Whether you’ve been through a larp, a work of magic, a psychedelic experience, or all of the above, they all have a huge transformative potential. For all of them, integration roughly works the same way. This list is partly inspired by a course about integrating psychedelic experiences that I followed in 2019.
What is integration? Integration is the process of absorbing the experience you had and its consequences as a part of your life and yourself. Making it not a separate element but a part of a whole, and acting towards the changes that might be needed for that.
A lot of what follows might sound like common sense – and well, it kind of is. It’s not done that frequently though. I myself more often than not didn’t follow all of these bits of advice (and not knowing them played a part in that). Read it not as a set of rules, but as guidance. The chronological order is supposed to make sense, but it could also be relevant to go back to some of the tips several times or to explore them in a different order. It doesn’t have to be linear.
1. Create some archives.
Write a report of what you’ve been through. Focus on what’s been important for you rather than on getting every detail right. If writing’s not your thing, draw, take pictures, dance or talk and record it.
Don’t get analytical for now. Just gather material to go back to later.
This should be done within two days after the experience, and as soon as possible. We forget and/or transform our memories very quickly. It’s like remembering a dream when you get out of bed: if you don’t catch it quick enough, it’ll dissolve into your day – maybe you’ll remember parts of it later, but maybe not. Do not be too afraid to forget things though: you will and it will be okay.
2. Rest.
For real. Take time to recover. Get some days off if you can. Eat as healthy as possible for you. Sleep enough.
If you can, spend some time in nature, move your body in ways that are enjoyable for you.
If you’ve been shaken, take time to assess if you might have been through a traumatic experience. Seek help if needed.
Resting also means not getting involved in other things with a transformative potential for a while. If you just keep going, you risk, first, fatigue, second, encountering the same kind of experience and its potential difficulties again, because you didn’t integrate them the first time. As Alan Watts wrote: “When you get the message, hang up the phone”.
3. Avoid making any big decisions.
Avoid making big decisions for several weeks or even months, depending on the impact of the experience. Take the time to integrate. If it’s deeply true now, it will still be in two or six months.
This might include: change of relationship status, moving to another city or country, deciding to become a parent, leaving your job…
If you’ve been stuck in a situation for a long time and the experience gives you the impulse to get out, it’s understandable if you decide to use it. Still, strive to avoid brutality.
4. Pay attention to your dreams.
Pay attention to your dreams in the following days and even weeks. Write them down in the morning, draw them or record yourself telling them. Do you notice any change in patterns, themes, characters or elements that appear? Do you see any links with what you recently experienced? You could find interesting clues there about the ongoing transformations.
5. Go back to what you experienced physically.
Were there specific emotions or sensations? Where were they located in your body?
How did you react to them then? How do you react to them now when you think about them? And if you try to recall, recreate them? Do these sensations trigger or evoke specific memories, or other sensations? Do they call for specific movements or physical practices? If yes, can you try it out? You might need someone else to help you with the physical work, maybe to push or massage some parts of your body. It could also just be a need to be held or hugged. Please ask people close to you or if it’s not an option for you, think about asking a professional.
6. Meaning’s weaving.
What were the messages you were given? The themes present during the experience? It’s time to go back to the raw data you collected, to create links, meaning, hypothesis. How can you connect what you experienced with other parts of your life?
If you have tools you feel at ease with for creating meaning, use them. For example, you could do a tarot spread about what was conveyed by the experience, what you need to learn, and so on.
If this was a shared experience – and I guess it will often be the case, especially for larps – it’s a good time to exchange with people who lived it with you. Do you have something specific you wanna tell them? What was different and what was similar for them? How do you all feel about what you shared? Does it have a specific meaning for you? Is it the same for the others, or not? Do you need or want to make any change in your relationships after that?
Creating meaning often leads to creating a story. You will probably tell stories about what you experienced in the future, often in the same way. You might want to stay open to new angles, new ways to approach the experience over time. It’s also important to acknowledge and accept that people who shared the experience with you will all have their stories: expect that they might be quite different from yours, don’t project what you experienced onto others’ experiences.
7. Look out for parts of you that might want to resist transformation.
It’s extremely normal to be, at least on some levels, afraid of change. We know what’s there now but not what is to come. There’s safety in knowing, even in uncomfortable situations. Treat the parts of you that could be afraid or want to block the process with respect. You can try to identify them through, to name a few, feelings of uneasiness, closing of the body, or procrastination, and give them a shape in your mind. Try to bring understanding, compassion, rather than brute force to bear on them. What would they need to accept the change you want to bring (or the change that’s already there)? You could try inner dialogues, symbolic acts or emotional reassurance in imagination.
8. Picture yourself in one year.
Set a time to do this, maybe 30 minutes, maybe more, dedicated to the question. How do you want this experience to have affected your life in one year? How are you different? What did you do during the year to reach that place? What bodily sensations are present? Which emotions? Express it through your preferred medium. If you record it in one way or another, go back to it from time to time during the year.
9. Which voices do you need at the moment?
Find out which artists, writers, thinkers, influencers et cetera could help you move forward, could bring more food for thoughts, or could echo your experience. Get inspired. See how you’re – hopefully – not alone.
10. Time for action.
What can you do to go in the direction of the transformation that the experience pointed towards?
Pick one action you can do in the two following weeks.
Is there one small promise to yourself you could follow every day from now on?
This could also be the time to express yourself, whether by creating art, writing a testimony to share, and so on. If you didn’t find any echo in the step #9, this might be especially important. You could be the voice some other people need.
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:
Teteau-Surel, Leïla. “10 Steps for Integrating Transformative Experiences.” 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.
We step into the ritual chamber wearing our ceremonial robes, the hoods on our heads. We’re at a beautiful estate in the Danish countryside, secluded enough to feel the outside world only as a distant concern. The larp is Baphomet (2015-) and I participated in it in 2019. It details the fall of a vintage era Hermetic cult as they connect with the dark gods Pan and Baphomet.
As the ritual goes on, we huddle in the middle of the room, backs to each other, facing the walls. A High Templar circles us and intones the ritual while we hum a low, collective sound that feels bigger and deeper than any individual.
The experience goes beyond the typical boundaries between fiction and reality that superficially define larp. The outwards-facing huddle is a simple formation but it means that my back is physically against other players. I feel the sound vibrate in their bodies. Someone shorter than me is in front and their voice is indistinguishable from mine.
Our collective hum changes. There are vibrations, emotions, dissonances and shrieks. It feels like an auditory summation of the larp’s emotional state at that point. There are moments of terror and warmth. It’s a profoundly positive experience of togetherness but the larp’s horror themes shine through and fear makes itself manifest.
The seemingly contradictory experiences of human connection and inner darkness are present at the same time, not as a contradiction but as complementary elements. This is a common theme in a family of larps of which Baphomet is one.
Others in the same genre are Pan, House of Craving, Inside Hamlet, Libertines, Conscience, and End of the Line. They are defined by an aesthetic of sordid indulgence, dark emotional content, and playground-style design creating opportunities for participants to sin creatively.
Baphomet Run 2. Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
Communities of Sin
As is typical of larp, these games create small temporary communities, microcosms in which the participants enable each other to experience the thrills and terrors that draw them in. In my personal experience, the communities of play especially in the smaller larps such as Baphomet and House of Craving (2019) are unusually warm, supportive and positive.
Indeed, so much so that participants joke about not wanting to go back to the real world and its hierarchies, anxieties and daily oppressions. While the larp’s fictional landscape is full of degradation and injustice, the off-game community is humble, constructive, and ready to listen.
Of course, no larp experience is homogenous across its player space. There are surely other player experiences as well, especially in the bigger of the larps mentioned. Still, when I’ve left for the airport after the larp, the positivity of the play community has been a topic of conversation with other players in a way that differs from most of my other larp experiences.
After one of these larps, I lamented with another male player the fact that the easy physical closeness between men would slowly fade in the outside world. It would become more awkward to hug as the repressions of society wore away at us.
This experience of closeness and community doesn’t happen by accident. Larps all about characters doing terrible things to each other function best when the workshops are geared to build trust and intimacy. When the players feel safe and comfortable they can go to emotional extremes that would otherwise be inaccessible to them.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
When I think about other types of larps that have featured a similarly close, warm community experience, they’ve tended to be small games which have workshops with similar goals. One such is the Brody Condon larp The Zeigarnik Effect (2015) in Norway. We played characters undergoing gestalt therapy and the workshops were needed to get us accustomed to the game’s unusual mode of communication and interaction.
Because of the positive nature of the overall emotional experience of these larps I’ve started to wonder whether they’re horror larps at all. The one I worked on, the Vampire: the Masquerade larp End of the Line (2016-), was explicitly conceived as a horror-themed playground designed to enable each participant in a dynamic, personal way. The aesthetic was from horror but the actual experience was made so you’d get to do fun things you can’t do otherwise.
Designed for Transgression
There are a few design choices that make this sort of larp possible. They tend to be typical of Nordic larp design in general but are often implemented in specific ways to enable the players to transgress in a fun and safe way.
Workshopping together to build intimacy, trust and a shared sense of the social space is crucial. The players have to feel that the play community of the larp supports them and is open to their ideas. They have to feel free to express themselves and take creative risks. This is achieved with workshop exercises that build trust and intimacy. In some larps, player selection also plays a part.
Safety or calibration mechanics that allow the player to stop or adjust play on the fly also play an important part. The presence of such mechanics makes it possible for participants to feel like they can trust their fellow players and the play situation.
These mechanics can be used for many different reasons, not all of them dramatic. When they work well, they allow the player to navigate around issues that make transgressive content difficult for them to access, whatever those issues might be.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
While not present in all the larps mentioned in this article, transparency is great for enabling the players. In Inside Hamlet, Pan, Baphomet, and House of Craving, every player can read all characters if they so choose in the preparation for the larp. For some players this makes it easier for them to instigate transgressive game content with other players. They know from their reading that the other player’s character is just as fucked up as their own.
All together, these design choices work best when they give the player the tools to take responsibility for their own larp experience. A player who feels enabled and in control can more easily engage in play where the character is in the opposite situation.
Cruelty is Fun
There’s an overlap in themes, techniques and player base between these larps and BDSM culture. They allow us to enjoy feelings, sensations and emotions that are taboo in normal conversation and polite society. Things that are ordinarily considered wrong, debased, or evil become playful, fulfilling, and fun when enacted within a consensual, supportive context.
BDSM often features role-play and I don’t think that’s categorically different from larp with erotic or sexual themes. Rather, there’s a sliding scale of different designed experiences from an abstracted larp experience to a fuck session with a light sheen of fiction.
One example of a thing that’s bad in real life but often fun in play is cruelty. In the right context and with the right people, cruelty can be tremendously sexy.
Everyday life has limited opportunities to enjoy cruelty in an ethical way because it tends to require a victim. In larp and BDSM the victims are there consensually and they can enjoy the thrill of being subjected to cruelty, safe in the knowledge that they control their own play and can exit it as needed. In this way, being the victim of cruelty can become a fulfilling, profound experience. For a player of a masochistic or submissive bent, all the more so.
The design of these larps supports the playing of cruelty in much the same way the culture around BDSM scenes supports it. Safety mechanisms and workshopping provide a framework in which taboo impulses can be explored. Character writing and other design elements provides alibi for being cruel. However, personal experience suggests that the most dynamic scenes of cruelty in a larp are expressions of player creativity and energy enabled by the design but not necessarily originating in it.
Members of the Voltemand noble family at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.
In Baphomet, there was a scene where another character threw me to the ground and kicked me in the balls. Following the rules of the game, the hits and kicks connected only lightly and I play acted to make them seem real. I fell to the ground, groaned, moaned, whimpered. I remember the scene very well because there was a release of energy, a spontaneous burst of power animating those present. Even for someone like me, who’s not masochistic by nature, it was a fun larp scene to be in because of the intensity and release of emotion.
The over the top spectacle and transgressiveness of cruelty makes it interesting and dynamic even when it doesn’t satisfy a personal kink.
Sex
Did I ever tell you about that time I was fucking my dead wife’s sister while moaning my wife’s name in her ear? It was funny because my son was there too. I remember him drawling: “Go Dad!”
There was also a ghost who was touching his crotch through his pants but that was normal in House of Craving.
Sex is a huge component of these larps. Sometimes there’s so much fucking that players complain of it becoming boring. It’s larp sex of course but the playstyle is physical. You might not actually engage in genital penetration but you’ll probably end up kissing people, groping them, getting groped, caressing, touching.
It’s amazing how quickly this sort of sexual interaction becomes normalized. Once everyone has collectively adjusted their perception of what’s normal you find yourself casually grinding with people as easily as you ordinarily shake hands. The way we’re socialized, sexual and flirtatious contact always matters. It always means something. Except after a morning’s larp workshop, it suddenly doesn’t.
Although this has the effect of banalizing sexual interactions, it also makes it possible to reach new types of sexually inflected play that would otherwise be out of reach. It also feels liberating: It’s fun to be part of a community that has temporarily decided to let go of standards of sexual behavior.
A courtier at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.
Of course, the role of sex in your experience depends on the specific larp and how you choose to play it. In Inside Hamlet (2015-), about the last days of the degenerate court of King Claudius, I played a judgmental priest. I participated in many sex scenes but my role was to denounce the sinners for their moral turpitude. Other times, like in House of Craving, sex becomes such a basic element of the larp’s landscape that you won’t even remember all the fucks you participated in.
House of Craving is about a family who gets together to remember the dead mother and wife. The malevolent house starts to affect them, ghosts guide them, and finally they fall into an everlasting state of mutually destructive degeneration. As the characters’ sense of reality collapses, so does the need for the larp’s fiction to be coherent. The higher truths of the emotional journey take precedence.
I have never participated in so many debased larp scenes as I did in that game but it felt quite straightforward when it was happening. The workshops had glued us into a cohesive social unit and we could brutalize each other with casual ease. The play was intense, so much that I took frequent breaks in the off-game area to gather my wits. Often someone else was there too and we enthused together about how great the experience was.
The approach to sex in the design of these larps is coy despite the graphic nature of the stories they generate. It’s all about the tease, not the actual act of fucking for real. You don’t have sex, you dryhump. From the purpose of larp dynamics this works much better as sexual flirtation drives action but sexual fulfillment doesn’t. The character may be sexually satisfied but the player isn’t and that keeps the player in motion.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
Prey
Baphomet and Pan (2013, 2014, 2020) feature a signature piece of larp design: the necklace mechanic. The way it works is that a player who wears either the Pan or Baphomet necklace is that god. Other characters will worship their god, falling on their knees in manic adoration. They do everything the god says.
You can wear a necklace for a maximum of half an hour after which you should pass it onto another player. This way, the necklaces travel the larp, organically causing chaos.
Wearing the necklace is a power trip. It’s fun to be worshiped. There’s more to the experience, however. As a larper, you’re very well aware that the god has to provide content for their followers. It’s fun to tell people what to do but it uses up material pretty fast. There was a moment when I was standing in the middle of a room with perhaps ten people kneeling all around me, waiting expectantly. I drew a complete blank. Couldn’t think of a single thing for them to do.
Suddenly I heard one of the players vocalizing like you do in that situation, just speaking whatever seems kind of appropriate. They said: “We want to eat you.”
Blessed inspiration! Feeling great relief, I proclaimed: “Eat my flesh!”
The others thronged at my feet and started biting my flesh, especially my arms since they were exposed. Not very hard, but hard enough to leave a mark. Still, it was a small price to pay for being spared the terror of failing to provide playable larp material for the expectant crowd.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
Most players pass on the necklace much faster than the 30 minute limit. I don’t think I ever had it for longer than fifteen minutes. That’s just enough time to do one scene.
The necklace is a wonderful symbol for how these larps work because it shows the fun of both sides of the power equation: the experience of wielding power and of being subjected to power. When players play these scenes, they support each other’s experiences. Neither the god nor the worshippers can experience that role without the other.
There’s a distinct difference in the power equation in terms of how many people there are in a scene. When I have the necklace and I’m surrounded by ten other people, ostensibly I have the power. However, their expectations as players place great demands on me, effectively constraining how much I can use my game-granted authority. In contrast, when the scene is small, it’s much easier to start choreographing other people. In a smaller scene, I can safely assume that there’s enough to do for the other players, giving me freedom to think about what’s fun for me. Perhaps because of this, my best necklace scenes were small.
When we made End of the Line, we focused on the basic vampire theme of predator and prey. In the design, we strove to make as many of the characters as possible into both. Depending on the circumstances you could hunt other characters and be hunted in turn.
End of the Line (Finland, 2016). Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen.
The thrill of being hunted is an essential part of the experience, indeed possibly even more integral as that of being the hunter. You can zoom out from this assertion to a wider characteristic of larp design: Often in larp, villains, enemies, and oppressors are used as supporting characters to generate play. The player characters are the victimized whose experience is subject to a lot of design thought. Against this background, the design in End of the Line was an attempt to systematize this dynamic while also giving the hunter an autonomous play experience that didn’t feel like playing a supporting character.
After the larp, one player compared the design to primal play found in BDSM culture, where predator and prey-dynamics similarly provide a foundation for the fun.
Pure Experience
In many of these larps, especially in Baphomet and House of Craving, the design foregrounds immediate emotional experience and interaction to an extreme degree. As Baphomet comes to a close, the lights are dimmed. This makes it harder to see who has the necklace and who doesn’t. The social dynamics of the game have been running for two days and the participants have fused into a collective madness where elements like character or story become increasingly meaningless compared to the immediacy of the interactive moment.
In these last moments, we don’t need the game design crutches of the necklace or the fictional frame. We are free floating active agents with full agency to let the impulses created by the larp’s social dynamics dribble out. We don’t play as individuals but as a collective.
House of Craving (2019). Photo by Bjarke Pedersen.
As the larp ends, we gather in the ritual room. The atmosphere is hysterical, people falling to pieces all over the place. Yet as a player it doesn’t feel dangerous at all. Quite the opposite: It feels like a place where you can safely allow the expressions of the experience to flow through you.
Huddling together, making the ritual hum, feeling it in our bodies, feeling our breath, voice, collective spirit start to tear as the gods Baphomet and Pan manifest. As players we know how this moment goes. We know the meaning of these choices on a game design level. We are mentally prepared to deal with the chaos even as it pulls at us from every direction.
The larp has two endings, the Pan ending and the Baphomet ending. As a player you can choose which god to follow depending on the themes of your game experience. I followed Pan in a horde of people running to the mansion’s spa area, tearing our clothes off as we went, plunging into the pool.
We’d had instructions that we should submerge ourselves in silence, without speaking or making a sound, and as we rose from the water we would be out of the game.
This didn’t happen. Instead as all the followers of Pan were standing in the water we started screaming. I have no idea who started it but suddenly the sound was swelling from inside us in an impersonal collective furor, a meaningless, inhuman wall of noise echoing from the walls of the pool chamber. As we became exhausted by the sound we went underwater and out of the fiction.
Inside Hamlet. Photo by Marie Herløvsen.
War Stories
The larp Inside Hamlet had a rule that after the game you were allowed to talk about your own experience but you shouldn’t talk about what other people were doing. It was okay to say: “I crawled and licked another player’s boots,” but not: “Gustav crawled and licked Annie’s boots.”
The purpose of this rule is to enable people to play freely with kinky, dark, and extreme subjects without getting outed with non-players who might not understand the context. It’s a community safety mechanism making it easier for players to relax.
This rule and other similar ones has left us with the result that these larps are often talked about in an euphemistic manner, eliding many of the more outré things that happen in them. Players talk about them face-to-face or in small, closed online groups.
When it’s only one larp, it doesn’t matter too much, but it’s become a hallmark of the genre. From the outside they’re decidedly opaque, which is especially obvious if you’ve gone to them and witnessed the discrepancy between the reality and the discourse. This is why I chose to write this essay: I wanted to make an attempt at mapping the emotional landscape of these experiences in an open manner without undue coyness.
Some of the larps mentioned in this essay, especially the bigger ones, feature complex, nuanced narrative elements. Conscience (2018-) modeled its storyworld on that of the TV series Westworld, and our End of the Line used a well-known role-playing game as its basis. Inside Hamlet is based on a famous play.
Ophelia’s Funeral at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Bret Lehne.
You can play each of those larps without engaging with the kind of sordid activities celebrated in this essay. Because of the breadth of their design, they can support many different kinds of playstyles.
This is why I think that while the tendencies of this genre are present in each of those games, they reach their fulfillment in Baphomet and House of Craving. In a sense, these two are not larps of the mind at all. They function on a more primitive, submerged emotional level where the nuances of the fiction don’t matter nearly as much as the emotional landscape of a beautiful larp scene.
Those moments of emotion are why I’ve played so many of these larps. Those and the warmth of their temporary, fleeting communities.
Cover photo: A Stormguard and a Companion at Inside Hamlet. Photo by Bret Lehne.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Pettersson, Juhana. “Terror and Warmth.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021.
Content Advisory: Statutory rape, sexual abuse, organizer negligence, manipulation
A Finnish man is dragging his luggage behind him as we approach a subway station in Rome. We both have wheeled suitcases with long handles, and while I carry mine down to the station, he drags his along the stairs. Bump, whirrr, bump, whirrr, bump, whirrr, bump…
“Aren’t you worried you’ll break your suitcase?” I ask him.
“No,” T replies, “if it breaks, it was a bad suitcase. I don’t want a bad suitcase.”
Little did I know, during the production of Dragonbane, I would become that suitcase.
Fifteen years ago, Dragonbane was played in Sweden. I was in the three-person team who begat it all, three years prior. I was the second, and the one responsible for the story, setting, and name of the larp.
The other two were Fýr Romu and T. My first book, the roleplaying book Myrskyn aika (“Age of the Tempest”) was about to be published when T came to the door of my studio apartment in Turku one day with a proposition. I have chosen not to use his full name.
“I am going to make a larp about a mechanical dragon. I want to set it in the world of Myrskyn aika, and I want you as the creative lead on this larp.”
(They might have used the word “main designer,” or “head writer,” but the meaning was the same.)
I knew T from before, us both having taken part in each others’ larps since the mid 90s. He was not a close friend, but I dare say we knew each other quite well. And knowing him, I had my doubts about his leadership style. His earlier big projects, the Wanderer larps, were known for bad management and burnouts.
“Yes. There were problems, but I have learned my lesson,” T told me in his deep voice. His deep, convincing voice.
Then he showed me their plans. A Finnish forestry company has an experimental six-legged logging machine. Like a robotic ant the size of a truck. With the published book giving us a professional status, we would convince them to loan that machine for the larp. Before that, we would recruit Fýr to build an animatronic dragon around it, and we could have it walk around in the larp. The dragon would be able to turn its head, make facial expressions, and even breathe fire. T and Fýr were both interested in pyrotechnics.
We did, indeed, soon recruit Fýr who, like me, was studying in Turku. He had a crooked smile and a ginger ponytail. I believe he would not object to me calling him a mad inventor. I did not know him then, but we are still connected now fifteen years later. I am still not sure if Fýr is younger or older than me.
Myself, I was a young artist and writer struggling with burnout, depression, and tendonitis. I believed larp is an art form and a medium, and wanted to prove this to the world. My professional writing career was just getting started, Myrskyn aika being a major breakthrough since it was published by a proper book publisher and sold in book stores. I was young enough to still be looking for mentors, but experienced enough in the larp scene to be wanted as a mentor by others.
Together, we set to work creating the coolest fantasy larp ever.
Plans and Realities
This was a time when the Nordic larp scene was still in its infancy. We had met foreign larpers at Knudepunkts, and taken part in some of their larps, but this was going to take all that to the next level. We would recruit an international team and create a mega-larp for 1200 players with pre-written characters. And the animatronic dragon.
Now, we did not have the dragon yet. We had our eyes set on a prototype made by Plustech, a Finnish subsidiary of the multinational corporation John Deere which makes tractors and forestry machines. But, T convinced me, once they see our plans, they would be idiots to say no. After all, what a prototype needs most of all is visibility, and that we could promise them. Imagine going to a forestry trade show with a dragon!
We had crazy plans. We would transform fantasy larp forever. We would have players from dozens of countries, making this by far the most international larp at the time. We would create the best larp in the world. Through pyrotechnics, magic would really work! The village would have bespoke wheat fields to reap, which would be sown months in advance. The budget would be one million euros. Every off-game item from cell phones to underwear would be forbidden. We would utilize experimental augmented reality technologies. Our trailer would feature Eddie Murphy and be shown in film theatres.
We quickly started to recruit teams of builders, designers, writers, and producers. T made plans for getting us sponsors and backers, Fýr started drawing blueprints for the dragon, and I went to work on coming up with a concept for the larp.
The recruiting process was a strange one to say the least. People found out they had been recruited when they started receiving messages from an e-mail list they had no idea they were on. Communication and leadership were chaotic, and I probably share some of the blame for that.
My own notes on who is working in what capacity are odd reading now, eighteen years later. We very quickly recruited Christopher Sandberg into the production team since we knew him as the hotshot producer of the Hamlet larp. The next time his name is mentioned in my notes, he is running the writing team together with me. Eventually he replaced me as the creative lead.
Mikko Rautalahti wrote in the Finnish Larppaaja magazine about how unflattering the project seemed from the outside. This rant was published in early 2004 so a long time before the larp actually happened:
The organization behind the project was constantly in flux … Communication between the different teams didn’t work, so for example the costume team made their plans based on an already obsolete player count without checking with the people in charge of the plot. As a cherry on top, some French harebrain decided to post a good portion of the project’s inner discussions online for the whole world to see, which obviously created even more confusion among organizers as well as the public.
…
The project checked all so-called [T] boxes. Even though the creative lead of the project is Mike Pohjola who has written Myrskyn aika and is known for the groundbreaking inside:outside, and has often demanded for more emphasis in larp writing, the producer [T] kept doing his own thing, recognizable by stunningly ambitious plans and a completely haphazard execution.
…
On the other hand, [T] is also known as a man who spits in his hands, takes the scarily big bull by its horns, and wrestles that monster to the ground regardless of how many people are standing by, saying it can’t be done.
…
One can’t help asking, does the game really have to be this big? Is the content such that realizing the vision really needs more than a thousand players – or is the true reason for the size simply the need to seem important?
Translated by myself for this essay.
This sort of feedback simply made us more determined to prove this could be done.
The Story
I had written a Middle-Earth tabletop roleplaying scenario for the Finnish roleplaying magazine Magus (published in 2001 in the magazine’s 50th and last issue). It was about beornings and dragon worshippers journeying into the Grey Mountains to encounter a dragon, and then, perhaps attack it, or bargain with it, or betray the others to it. I had written plenty of history for the dragon worshippers, and even added a note saying the adventure could be turned into a larp.
That became the first seed for the story of Dragonbane. The first brief went like this:
Two ancient peoples have been at war for longer than anyone can remember. It all began with a Dragon, god to some, enemy to others. Now, the dragon worshippers have almost won, and the last remnants of the once proud people have set a call for heroes: Who will slay the dragon?
The last few days have seen the arrival of several chivalric orders, a handful of mysterious sorcerors, and many strange travellers from lands afar. Some are there to contest for the right to slay the dragon, others (like the dragon worshippers) are present to argue against the slaying. And, of course, many people are there just to take advantage of all the foreign dignitaries.
…
What secrets does each hero carry inside them? What is your dragon? When it comes down to an epic battle of Good and Evil, you must decide what you think is Good. And pray to your gods you got it right.
That is where the project got the name Dragonbane from. (Later on, Christopher and I would try to change the name to the more appropriate Dragontide, but T deemed it too late.)
As the story was developed further, we listened to feedback from different team members, most prominently the country coordinators and the writers. Christopher and I talked endlessly on the phone about how to tackle the different creative issues we would face with having a thousand players from very different larp cultures with no time to get to know each other beforehand. The idea to use Finnish style pre-written multi-page character descriptions was soon scrapped.
The village of the dragon worshippers soon became Cinderhill. But it was not until later when Christopher was the main designer when we switched the approaching adventurers into the dragontamers and the witches. Those two groups, along with the dragon worshippers of Cinderhill, constituted the character mega-factions in the larp.
My plan was that Cinderhill would not be the typical feudal-capitalistic pseudo-medieval village of fantasy larps, but something like a religious cult and a Soviet commune. One of our Estonian team members had grown up in a Soviet commune, and did not see this as a very positive thing, but I tried to convince her Cinderhill would be a utopian version of that.
I, as a published author, was T’s trump card, and he took me to many meetings with sponsors and local authorities to show that he had a professional writer in the team. I would typically pitch the story of the larp to the potential partners, and then on the way home, write a letter we could send to our teams and the existing partners. In fact, much of my early work was writing these press releases instead of designing the larp.
Here’s one such letter, written to invite fantasy larpers into the project:
While larp is a fun hobby everywhere, there’s all the time more and more people saying it doesn’t have to be just fun, it can be an earth-shattering, world-changing miracle. Some larps in Northern Europe have made a stab at this. In the last few years, we’ve had larps like Europa, Panopticorp, inside:outside and Hamlet.
…
Until now, fantasy has been over-looked by the larp creators who wish to take the medium forward. Fantasy has long been stagnating into a tired collection of Tolkien clichés, but Dragonbane will reinvent fantasy for the 21st century.
…
We see larp as a medium very close to shamanism, magic and fantasy. With Dragonbane we aim to renew not only fantasy, but larping, as well.
Quite soon after we had announced the project, we were already on the way to Italy to be guests at Lucca Comics & Games Fair. I am still not sure whether we were really guest of honor, or if the local larpers just told us that. The “other” guests of honor included Larry Elmore and Margaret Weis, and we were quite starstruck.
We flew to Rome, T dragged his suitcase to the metro, and we took a train to Pisa, from where we were driven to Lucca. The local mayor cut an actual ribbon at the opening ceremonies of the convention.
We had two talks Friday, one about Nordic larp (which was called larp in Northern Europe back then) and the other one about Dragonbane. Everything we say was translated into Italian so the audience could understand us. We wondered at how these people could larp fluently in English.
In the evening I ran a small larp, I Shall Not Want, which was focused on subdued character immersion at murdered businessman’s wake. For many of the Italian participants this was their first non-fantasy larp, and the first one where the focus was on character immersion.
We did our best to network with the local larpers, and T put me to work writing lots of material for Dragonbane.
One morning at breakfast we noticed Larry Elmore was sitting alone at another table, eating his eggs. We knew him as the biggest fantasy artist of our childhoods, having made the cover of the Dungeons & Dragons red box we grew up with. T wanted to recruit him, I advised against it. Nevertheless, we went to his table, and introduced ourselves. Larry assumed we were random fans. He smiled politely and said hello.
Without blinking an eye, T started an unsolicited pitch on Dragonbane with his very strong Finnish accent. “And we will actually have a real animatronic dragon! Now, do you think that’s pretty cool or what?” Larry kept nodding politely, but it was obvious he did not believe a word we were saying, and wanted to be left alone. T took this as his cue to ask him to create original dragon art for us. Larry said something vague like “Sounds real interesting,” and promised to get back at us. He did not, of course. We were just two European crazies who interrupted his breakfast.
Later on, with a similar pitch, T did manage to attract the Argentinian dragon artist Ciruelo. The art on the poster was made by him.
The Rabbit Hole Method
Christopher Sandberg, a passionate Swedish larp designer and producer, delivered several long game design documents which included everything from the setting to costume design of the individual groups. We discussed the topics day after day, week after week, and finally came up with what we saw as a breakthrough: The Rabbit Hole Method.
The larp would start with the players in their regular clothes, suffering complete amnesia. They would not know who or where they are. Walking around in the woods, they would find clothes that feel much more appropriate, and slowly start to remember that they are, in fact, a dragon worshipper from the village of Cinderhill, or a witch, or a dragontamer. They would change into their real clothes, i.e. the costume. They would remember their new name, and find friends and family that they know quite well but they are also meeting for the first time.
This would take a few hours, and then they would arrive at the village or some other group location, where they would already be in character, and dream-like go about their business making paper or fetching water or starting fires. And then the larp would go on like a regular larp.
The Rabbit Hole would solve so many issues, mainly the players not knowing each other beforehand, and being able to play in their own languages as well as whatever English they can muster. Nowadays we would have workshops instead of trying to solve these issues in-game.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, Rabbit Hole is also a metaphor for taking hallucinogenic drugs. Some people did pick this up, and it again was a blow on the public image of the project.
We felt this was an ingenious solution. But our Danish country coordinator who had promised us fifty Danish teenagers said this was way too experimental for them. The kids liked to beat orcs in the woods, not take part in strange ritual dramas. (I am sure many of those former kids are running full-blown ritual drama larps now.)
Christopher and I felt we could convince the Danish teenagers, or forget about them. But T was worried about our player base. This was a thousand-person larp. We must have those teenagers! So, the Rabbit Hole was scratched, and we started to look for a more traditional approach.
We still did not have a location for the larp, but we did not want it to be in Finland. The neighboring countries Estonia and Sweden seemed good options.
The team got in contact with Estonian larpers and a location scouting team left Finland on a ferry.
T brought along his legendary Humvee which was known as “The Finnish Bar” in many Knutepunkts since he held unofficial parties there with lots of booze. I never went, but knowing he was later incarcerated for sex crimes, it is hard to know how much grooming happened at those parties.
Nevertheless, the car came in handy driving to the Soomaa national park in south-western Estonia. Sometimes we would cross bridges that were only barely able to carry the car’s weight, and all the passengers would have to get out and walk.
Local larpers took us to explore Soomaa on boats. It is a vast area of bogs, forests, and meandering rivers, where Estonian freedom fighters and bandits used to hide. The area that on the map had seemed suitable, proved to be completely impossible. It was a virtual jungle, and in the summer would be full of rapid animals and violent boars.
The evening was reserved for workshops. The production people including T and Mikko Pervilä held their own meeting in one part of the house we were using, while I talked with some of the writers. Fýr ran a third meeting for the Estonians who were present, and their job was to come up with a name for the dragon. I had no idea such a key element of the fiction was being crowdsourced, and when later that evening I was told she is called “Beautiful Death,” I simply thanked them for the input. This, obviously, got them quite irate, having just spent hours coming up with a good name. (And it was good.)
I went to visit the production meeting and I discovered a very drunk T angrily explaining to Mikko Pervilä about how he does not understand the project like T himself does. And Mikko, exasperatedly trying to get some point across. The Estonians probably did not get a very good impression of us.
The next day T took me to meet the director of the National Park. He was polite and interested, and promised to stay in touch. (He did.) He also suggested a different location, parts of which were on privately owned land, and could be built on.
The new location was idyllic, you almost expected to find a hobbit village somewhere. The area was mostly plains or dried swamp, with small forested areas providing contrast. A beautiful river ran slowly through the plains, providing an interesting in-game obstacle for anyone needing to cross it. There was a ruined farm house with just the chimney remaining, and a wild orchard in the yard. Berry bushes and apple trees had started to spread in the nearby lands.
We figured we could build our village right on the outskirts of the national park. T envisioned a grand main hall for the village that he could then use as his personal summer cabin after the larp. “And I’m sure some envious larpers will twist that around to sound like I’m only using free labor to build myself a huge cabin! But after a project as huge as this, I think I’m entitled to something for myself.” Another possibility would have been to testament the cabin to the whole team or to one of the organizations behind the larp, but these were not mentioned.
For some reason, there was no room in the Humvee for me on the way back, so I had to take a series of Soviet-era buses to get to Tallinn and the ferry. This gave me time to do some of the writing tasks T had given me, including writing a letter about the successful Estonian scouting trip for our team and sponsors. Typing on a laptop in a bouncing bus, hands hunched like a vulture’s feet, was not good for my tendonitis.
The bus-ride turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I later found out T’s Humvee had broken down on the country road he had been driving. I was not there, but I remembered his comments about the suitcase in Italy. “It broke down, so it was a bad car. I don’t want a bad car.”
Still struggling with stress, depression and the wrists, I was starting to suspect, if I would break down, too, before all this was over.
After we had publicly announced that we had chosen Soomaa as the location, the Estonian authorities did, indeed, contact us again. They said we absolutely cannot use the National Park since many of the things we have planned are directly against the rules of the park and the laws governing it.
T and I were both quite angry and disappointed at the Estonians. If someone had made sure of this a few months earlier, we would have saved hundreds of hours of labor, by skipping the whole trip. In retrospect, it was us, the main organizers, who should have made sure of that.
Suspect Parties
Many of the bigger project meetings took place at T’s home in the countryside between Turku and Helsinki. There were also several other people there, some from T’s larp organization, some his friends, others just people hanging around. Or maybe they were all involved in Dragonbane. I discovered Fýr was now employed by T’s company.
The workshop weekends included meetings and commonly prepared meals, but also lots of extracurricular activities, including clearing the garden of dried shrubs. I did not take part in that. I was also a teetotaler at the time, so I could not fully participate in the other program which mostly consisted of drinking games in the sauna, drinking games in the pool, and drinking games wrapped in towels.
There were always teenaged girls around, and these older men wanted to get them drunk. I did not know the girls, maybe they were involved with one of them, maybe they were just working on the project, maybe something more sinister was happening. It was hard to tell, and knowing what I now know, I should have spoken out more clearly. Today, I would characterize the atmosphere as toxic.
We writers did have actual productive meetings, though, although sometimes they felt more like seance sessions, with us trying to decipher what Christopher was saying over a long-distance phone call on speakerphone.
The rumors and the strange mood and the “use them until they break” style of management obviously led to many, many people burning out, quitting or just quietly disappearing. This meant we had to constantly find new people to take on those positions. People kept coming and going. Christopher as creative lead was replaced by others before the project was over.
For Solmukohta 2004, Juhana Pettersson and I designed the art larp Luminescence, produced by Mikko Pervilä. It is known as “the flour larp,” since we had a room filled with 750 kilos of wheat flour. Plenty has been written of that larp in other articles, but cleaning up after the larp was quite a hassle.
T wanted me to be in some Dragonbane meeting, while I was expected to be cleaning the room. “No problem,” he said, and ordered two teenaged volunteers to go clean the flour room while I took part in the meeting. Needless to say, the volunteers simply left the project, and I later got an angry call from the janitor.
Luminescence. Photo by Juhana Pettersson.
At a later stage in the project, a larper woman I was dating told me T had asked her to join Dragonbane‘s music team. Having seen what was going on at those project workshops, I did not feel them to be a safe environment for someone I cared about. (Again, I should have worked harder to protect also those I did not know.) I asked her not to participate in the project, and she got mad at me at first, but then agreed.
Since we were constantly struggling to recruit new people, and I as one of the key organizers had just worked against that goal, I finally started realizing I could not be involved in Dragonbane much longer.
Everything Goes Wrong
I was sitting in the audience at an ice hockey stadium listening to a pyramid scheme recruiting event. T was convinced we should have them as our financing partners, and had sent myself, and some of the production people to take part in the event, and then later on try to meet some of the key people in their dressing rooms.
The whole thing was obviously a scam. Obvious to me, but others in our team were not as skeptical.
We managed to get an audience with one of the speakers, and explain our case. Dragonbane could be officially branded by the pyramid scheme, and they would get lots of publicity for their business. They promised to think about this.
When Mikko Pervilä heard about this, he said he would quit immediately, if Dragonbane went through with this. So, the cooperation was cancelled. I am grateful to Mikko for that. (He later quit anyway.)
We had long since forgotten about getting Eddie Murphy for the trailer. Then we found out we would not get the Plustech forestry machine, either. How could we have Dragonbane the great dragon larp if we have no dragon?
The project went through constant changes. The location was switched from Estonia to Sweden, the targeted player number was cut and cut again from 1200 to 400. Fýr’s dragon building crew were hard at work making plans on a new kind of dragon built on top of a truck, but without Plustech, they could not keep up with the schedule.
Christopher and I realized there was no way for the larp to happen in 2005, and managed after long, painful debates to convince T to postpone it by a year. He opposed the change because once he promises to do something, he does it. But, we told him, his promise could not be kept in 2005, but it could be kept in 2006.
Around that time, T decided he had to change his leadership style. This is how he comments on the topic in the documentation book Dragonbane: The Legacy:
“As the project progressed, it became increasingly evident to all participants that the only viable decision making model was a military style one. The more idealistic version proposed early in the game just did not produce results and in a project of this size and with this little time it is not a good alternative. There are reasons why corporations and businesses do not operate on committee or democracy basis.
A smaller, less international project could have succeeded with less dictatorial management, but with Dragonbane the more authoritative style should have been adopted even earlier. In hindsight, it is easy to see that the year we lacked could have been saved by choosing army style project management from day one.”
I wanted out. I was very stressed and felt I would soon break like the suitcase and the car and so many other people in the team before me. But explaining this to a person who does not take no for an answer was not easy.
I told T I needed to do some paying work since Dragonbane was taking up all my time. “How much do you need?” he asked. He proposed I come work for him. Having seen how Fýr was already in a position of T having economic power over him, and now with militaristic style, this was not what I wanted to hear.
In the end I just had to tell him I could not work in the project under any circumstances. “Fine,” he said. “I hope you won’t turn against us and start badmouthing us.” I promised I would not. And I have not written or spoken about my experiences publicly, until now.
After that I became a broken object, someone T did not want around.
A year later the larp was actually about to happen in the forests of Bumfuck, Sweden. (Actually Älvdalen in Dalarna County.) I could not take part in the larp as my mandatory civilian service would start immediately after and if I was late, I would be punished. Travel to and from Älvdalen took so long I could not risk it, but I wanted to be there at the start.
I had read online about how the players who had arrived early had met angry organizers and been forced to work on building the village. The dragon’s neck had broken and it was being repaired at a vocational institute in Finland. Nothing was ready, and there was not enough food for the involuntary volunteers.
Fundin, a Dragontamer player from Sweden had this to say:
Mistakes were made, and I think the main one was not trusting that the players could fix things for themselves, less promises would have made a better game.
Had we been told to bring tents, cooking gear, food and taming tools the game would have been better. There were few who couldn’t bring tents for example, no problem, then only a few tents would have had to be made = less work for the organisers.
I asked about making taming tools and was told to go to Finland or southern Sweden for a workshop… I would have been able to make them at home if that had been cleared beforehand..But *No* was the general answer to any Idea, everything had to be specially made for DB, that was the big problem, and you were not allowed to make anything by yourself without an organiser or a workshop.
When I arrived, the mood among the organizers in “The Bootcamp” was, indeed, hostile. At the time I thought it was because I was seen as a traitor, having quit the project. Now I have found out the mood was hostile towards everyone so it could have simply been lack of sleep. That ten people who should have been there to help were repairing the dragon had taken its toll.
It was clear everything was badly organized and there were not enough people to do everything that had to be done. And not enough cars to get people from the Bootcamp to the larp village to build it. On the other hand, there were a huge number of incredibly beautiful props, fabrics, and such.
I did odd jobs. I cooked a hearty vegetarian meal for the people at the Bootcamp. I remember T being very happy that I took carnivores into account, not realizing the sauce was soy grit instead of minced meat. I helped dye scrolls with strong tea. I helped the players build the village. I held the opening brief for the players in the witch group.
The players and volunteers I met were exhausted and almost delirious. One of them, Tonja Goldblatt, looked at me, unbelieving, when I arrived at the village. They had not eaten or rested properly, and had to work in the poorly organized work camp. When I had wanted Cinderhill to resemble a Soviet commune, this was not what I had in mind. It was certainly no utopia.
I wasn’t part of any main organizing team, but I ended up working my ass off for this project and I burned out. It was no small feat and it did manage amazing things, but Dragonbane broke me for years. For years it was really hard for me to talk about the whole project because of the bitterness. It was my first international larp and turned me away from Nordic Larping for years.
I only caught rumors of the larp itself from the Bootcamp, and then I had to leave. As I was ready to depart, the dragon arrived. They had driven it to a ferry, sailed it to Sweden, and driven it from the ferry to Älvdalen. Its neck was still broken, but it could move.
At the last moment T decided to replace the person who had prepared to play the voice of the dragon. He replaced him with himself. Even though the fancy software could turn everyone’s voice into the dragon’s voice, it could not change his very recognizable accent.
Aftermath
For the longest time I was ashamed of the project. I assumed almost everyone had a really bad time. And sure, many people did. Many burnt out. But for others this was every bit the magical experience we had set out to create. Friendships were forged and sense of wonder essential to fantasy created lasting memories.
In the book Nordic Larp, Johanna Koljonen’s and Tiinaliisa T’s article on the larp starts with these atmospheric words:
I heard the dragon give out a heart-rending shriek. The sky exploded, and pillars of fire shot up behind the temple. The Dragon died – and at that moment it became truly real. The odd angle of the head looked like the twisted position of one who has expired in pain. And its skin, when I rushed in, wailing, towards it, felt slightly warm to the touch.
In the same book, an anonymous Cinderhillian player comments:
We indeed had a working village! When we bakers found out we had bread and cheese, but nothing to slice the cheese with, one of the village smiths made us a perfectly good cheese-slicing tool!
Charles Bo Nielsen recently reminisced on the group Larpers BFF:
I would like too add that as someone who was 18 at that larp, it was an amazing experience, first major international larp for me. So heavily coloured from that perspective.
There were some really interesting things about the larp. It was insanely ambitious, especially for the times, it had a really really big budget, due to being heavily funded, beyond the player tickets of 130 euroes, which back in 2006 was considered quite the sum for going to a larp.
From my point of view it ended up really grumbling under its own hype, the organizers ended up promising everything and certainly not delivering everything.
In Denmark spinoff larps were run, continuing the story of the dragontamers.
The village that was built was robbed soon after the larp, and then left in the woods to decay. Later on, the local municipality burned it down.
Essi Santala, who worked with Fýr on the dragon, wrote: “I would not be who I am today without Dragonbane. I know it was a devastating project for some people but for me it meant major friendships, togetherness, overcoming obstacles and a sense of awe over what we accomplished over the course of the project. I spent two years part of Dragonbane. It was awesome. Was it a good larp? The question, to me, is irrelevant.”
I would still stay in contact with Christopher, and a year after Dragonbane we would found a company together. Fýr is studying filmmaking in Prague. Mikko has produced many other big events including Solmukohtas.
In 2015, T was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison for statutory rape and sexual abuse, and he quit the larp scene.
It is bittersweet to think back on Dragonbane now. Thanks to those who worked for and took part in our visions. Apologies to those that were hurt or broken. I hope young organizers and designers of today are more aware of toxic environments and what to do about them.
I would invite everyone who has memories or questions of Dragonbane to discuss the topic further with me and others.
Disclaimer: In this text, the word “relationship” never purely alludes to romance. It could be any connection between characters: from co-workers to soldiers and commanding officers to siblings or bitter enemies. This article compiles discussions with dozens of people spanning hundreds of hours in total. It is very possible that I quote something verbatim and not even remember that you gave me that idea. No harm is intended in any way.
I was at a beautiful international larp. A big, raucous party was in full swing. People were flirting, drinking and fighting. And somehow, no matter how hard I tried, I could not find a way into the play. My attempts at provocation were brushed off, and my attempts at flirting fared even worse. My character was supposed to be powerful, but I certainly did not manage to evoke that feeling.
After a while, I noticed that several other people were also drinking wine in chairs in the corner, all by themselves. Most of them seemed, like me, otherwise outgoing participants who had seen most of their relations fall flat. The one thing I had in common with my fellow wallflowers was that all of us were either older, overweight, or both. It is possible this was a coincidence. It did not feel like it.
Later, at the 2017 Knutepunkt, I was dragged into a large conversation about casting and in-game status, and how those things are often determined by the way the participants look, either consciously or subconsciously. This discussion resonated with me, and, during that event, I asked many people about their personal experiences with their real life appearance influencing how they were treated at larps.
The year after that, I hosted a programme item about appearance-based prejudice with a very diverse panel. This panel received a lot more attention than I had expected, and I kept getting approached about it during that Knutepunkt and long after. There were tears and powerless anger, loss of faith in co-participants and in the community, and so many stories. Once the stories started coming out, they never stopped. And I realized that discrimination based on physical appearance was even more commonplace than I thought. I also realised that we do not speak about it often enough.
Larp usually strives to create settings, situations and relations, often involving total strangers, that feel completely real on an emotional level from the moment the larp starts. Most people will tap heavily into lived experiences and emotions to achieve this. That also means that unless the participant is very good at keeping themselves separate from their character, bleed((Sarah Lynne Bowman, “Bleed: The Spillover Between Player and Character,” Nordiclarp.org, March 2, 2015.)) will happen and those same instincts, preconceptions and frameworks that we use for fast immersion are also applied to our co-participants and our perceptions of them.
In itself, this is not a problem, but it can turn ugly very fast when those perceptions are built on negative biases. Gender, ethnicity, age, able-bodiedness, body type and many more aspects of our co-participants influence how we interact with them at larps. Most people are hardly, if at all, aware of these biases, as they are often unconscious.((Much has been written about this, but Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald’s “Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People” (2013) is an accessible read. You can test your own implicit biases at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html)) For example, we may associate middle-aged people with being less active, overweight people with being less smart, or people with mobility issues with being frail, and adjust our interactions based on that. The good news is that once we are aware of our biases, we can train ourselves to actively work against them.
This piece is mainly written to put a spotlight on a problem that many of us are only too familiar with from personal experience, so that it becomes something we can keep addressing as a community. I have mainly spoken to people who have experienced fatphobia, ageism, and rejection based on perceived attractiveness, and have personally experienced the same. Most of my examples will thus be based in those types of prejudice.
Of course, many other biases exist. PoC and queer writers have been writing about appearance-based discrimination for years, for example in last year’s KP-book with Jonaya Kemper’s excellent “Wyrding the Self” and Kemper, Saitta, and Koljonen’s “Steering for Survival” in the same volume.
What Forms Does Appearance-Based Prejudice Take?
The people I have spoken to over the years mainly report the following behaviors of other participants based on their out-of-game looks:
(Aspects of) their characters not being taken seriously, reactions being different from how the character should be treated, for example when playing leaders, soldiers or famous people.
Rejection from in-game relationships, especially romantic ones.
Not being involved in the plot or other aspects of the larp. This is for example often the case with older or less able-bodied participants when the plot involves action.
These behaviours allow us to discern several forms of rejection.
Rejection Surrounding Desirability
This mainly happens with romantic relationships, but can also pertain to certain types of characters, for example being the ingenue at a party that everyone wants to be around according to the game material.
Rejection Surrounding Status and Fame
This mainly happens with people portraying celebrities, heroes or people of importance to a setting, when they are not treated as such by their co-players.
Rejection Surrounding Authority and Power
Shorter participants for example are often not taken seriously in commanding positions and have to work harder to be listened to, as do younger and/or female-presenting participants.
Rejection Surrounding Expertise
Skills that are not taken seriously, for example with older participants portraying hackers.
Rejection Surrounding Athleticism
Less able bodied or heavier participants may be given a hard time when portraying athletes or soldiers.
Of course, we can never know why certain play did not happen for a certain participant. Maybe there was something else going on: it is always best to assume that people do not operate from bad faith. But for quite a lot of participants, the problems they encounter are too systemic to dismiss as bad luck.
As said before, most people are simply unaware of the many cognitive biases they have. So when we engage with complex and stressful social situations like larp, it only makes sense that those biases partially take over. But not being deliberate does not make discrimination any less of a problem.
Why This is Everyone’s Problem
Lifting the characters in a larp is a collective responsibility, because the quality of the larp depends on it. Lifting the participants should also be a collective responsibility, because the quality of our communities depends on it.
People who larp are vulnerable. We open up to other participants in many ways, and we have expectations of the experience that are often directly tied to aspects of our out-of-game personality.
This close connection can make in-game rejection, mockery, or being left out of parts of the larp very hurtful, even more when the rejections are based on aspects of the participant’s appearance that are also a struggle or sometimes even a source of trauma in real life. This can create very bad bleed situations or triggers that may cause people to drop out of a larp (or even out of the community altogether) and perceive it in a very negative light afterwards.
The loss of confidence can be long-term. For example, it took me years to regain the confidence to play a severely underprivileged character again after being mocked for “certainly not looking hungry” over and over again during a larp.
This downward spiral will lead those rejected participants to be skeptical towards others attempting to engage with them, and to approach any new in-game relationship very warily. Consequently, they can come across as closed-off, resulting in even more rejection from the other participants for seeming passive. Internalised oppression is powerful, and negative feedback loops are easily entered. Many people I have encountered see themselves as a “lost cause” for certain types of play, for example playing on romance or leadership, and they will self-cast themselves away from it, even when they would find it interesting. It will take conscious effort and support from the community to undo that.
Apart from the personal pain, basing in-game reactions to certain characters on the way the participant looks, as opposed to what would make sense for the character, will often hurt the larp as a whole.
This has to do with the responsibility to play to lift.((Susanne Vejdemo, “Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143–46. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press, 2017.)) When we do not treat our co-participants in a way that makes sense for their characters, we are not lifting. Not only that, but the human tendency to copy social behavior will mean that others may follow suit, and eventually everyone is rolling their eyes as soon as the Duchess gives an order – no matter how competent and powerful she is established as being in the fiction. Sidelining character agency in this way undermines the plot and setting for all participants.
Rejected relationships can be equally damaging to a larp, especially if the relationship is very central to the plot: if nobody wants to marry the king’s eligible bachelorette daughter, a lot of the tension will drop for the whole story, and not just for the participants involved.
Counterpoints
A counterpoint that has some merit to it is that you cannot force people to play with certain co-participants. First and foremost: you should of course never have to play with participants who make you uncomfortable, for example romantic play with a significant age gap, or participants you have a bad history with.
However, if you are likely to refuse certain types of play due to out-of-game preferences, it is best to not rank those types of play as high priorities on a casting form – because you’re choosing not to play the pre-scripted relationships may threaten not just the experience of your co-participant but the structure of the whole larp. It doesn’t mean that you have to renounce (for example) playing romances, as it is usually possible to create that type of connection with someone you feel comfortable with during the larp itself, but you will avoid being cast in a huge dramatic romance with someone you will end up ignoring.
That being said: try not to let yourself get away with your biases. As with everything in life, it is important to acknowledge our prejudices in larp and actively try to work against them. We should take a chance on playing with someone we do not immediately feel drawn to every now and then. They usually turn out to be awesome.
Another good point is that chemistry is elusive and cannot be forced. Of course chemistry is real and valid, and a wish to play on that chemistry equally so. But chemistry is a somewhat vague concept, and we often decide too soon that it is absent. I think part of the reason for that is that chemistry is often confused with attraction, especially physical attraction, and players may decide there is none based on that. Chemistry is definitely something that can be built on and created to some extent. A famous example of “artificially” created chemistry are the “36 Questions” that will cause people to fall in love.((Arthur Aron, et al., “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (1997): 363-377.))
For individual larpers, it can be a delicate task to balance the need to play with somebody with whom they feel chemistry with giving all co-participants a fair chance at the interactions they need to play their character. Like with many things in larp, being conscious of why we play in a certain way is half the battle: when we favour play with someone we know we have chemistry with instead of working to build that chemistry with a newcomer (or someone that we might not feel immediately drawn to), this should be a conscious decision.
Many larpers have told me over the years that it is immersion-breaking for them when people look different from how they would expect their character to look. The key here is, of course, in the word “expectations.” Expectations are learned and cultural, and very much a product of the other stories we consume through media. And because they are learned they can also be unlearned, and adjusted in the fictional worlds we create so that larps can be more inclusive and empowering.
But even in cases where there is an objective physical disconnect between participant and character, such as older participants portraying teenage characters and the other way around: people are always more important than larp. Nobody wants to be limited by their body and only be allowed to play certain characters because of it. It is sometimes telling how the same people who easily accept that someone with green paint on their face is a goblin struggle to treat the 50 year old participant as a young princess.
Another Way of Thinking: Individual Participant Responsibility
I believe that larp is full of unwritten social contracts. As a community, we should keep stressing that in-game relationships are an example of such a contract, whether written by ourselves in pre-play or by the larpwrights.
Doing our best to approach other participants based on their character’s attributes instead of their real life attributes is also a social contract.
People can be very dependent on their co-participants for enabling their play, and we are all at least partially responsible for each other’s larp. If we abandon a relationship during the runtime, or if we ignore the behaviors we should embody towards a character, there will usually be very little opportunity for that person to replace it. In other words, their larp will suffer immensely from our rejection or passivity.
So my opinion is that when we create larps as well as when we play, we should keep in mind that:
You owe it to your fellow participant to at least try to play the relationships as designed, of course barring safety issues.
You owe it to them to communicate clearly and early if you really cannot play on the relationship as designed any further for whatever reason, so they do not waste their precious playtime needlessly pursuing it.
You owe it to them to try to play something with them. If it turns out there is no way to be a loving, caring father-figure to them, is there anything else they could use? Could the relationship turn harsh and bitter? Could you become an ideological advisor in their political career? This way you at least spend some of your play-energy on co-creating their experience, which is part of what the relationship is about.
You owe it to them to take them and their characters seriously.
Managing the way participants interact, and finding solutions when something goes wrong, is a shared responsibility between the individual participant, the co-participants and the organizers. If one of these three does not do their part, the problem will persist.
Of course all these things also apply to lifting others’ play in general and not just to people struggling due to the biases of co-participants. But if we all try to make it cool to play on the character instead of the participant, those biases will get way less of a foothold.
Now that we have outlined the issue, let’s look at what we can actively do to improve our larps and behaviour. The following sections are a compilation of advice and ideas gathered over the years, both for organizers and for participants.
Tips for Organizers: How to Limit Physical Discrimination at Your Larps
Design and Casting
When designing a larp, think about the form that concepts like being important, being in charge, and being desirable take in your fiction, and how that may be expressed. It is very possible that this form will roughly be the same as in current Western society (youth is beautiful, being loud is being powerful, etc.) but it should not be an automatic choice.
Maybe being quiet is seen as being thoughtful and thus important in your setting. Maybe age is attractive because it shows experience as a lover.
If you have ideals about making the larp empowering for everyone, changing some of these expectations may be a tool to achieve that. It then must become an integral part of the design: if this is not clearly communicated before the larp and in the characters, and the active expressions related to it are not workshopped, participants will probably default to what they know.
When casting for a larp, take a chance on certain participants. It is tempting to cast people who seem like a perfect fit appearance-wise, but try to focus on who really wants to play on the character’s attributes. This precaution won’t help the people who have grown too afraid to even ask for certain types of play, but it is a step towards being more inclusive. If you find it hard to keep biases out of the picture, consider enlisting help to blind-cast based purely on participant motivations. When the organizers ignore participant appearance in casting, this will stress that inclusivity is a value of the larp and the participants are more likely to follow suit. Your casting has the power to be hugely empowering for participants, not in the least because it will provide the alibi they may need to take a leap of faith and play a challenging character.
The promotional materials should reflect the desired situation. If all photographs from previous runs that are picked for the website only show conventionally attractive participants, the idea that the larp is mainly meant for them will settle in the minds of the participants and make the larp harder for those that do not look like that.
Organizers should make it explicit in all aspects of the design that participants are expected to lift each other. Luckily, it is increasingly common to include a clause against discrimination based on out-of-game features, or texts like on the Inside Hamlet (2014-) website:((Participation Design Agency, “Is this Larp For Me?” Inside Hamlet, last accessed January 20, 2021.)) “All genders, sexualities and bodies are invited to act wicked and be beautiful at this larp.”
However, a single written mention is not enough. Consider: are you also bringing attention to this issue in the workshops? Do people know if it is something they can contact the organizers about, and how? In short, how is the ideal “enforced” during the larp itself?
Remember that most of the time, participants’ behavior is way more subtle than outright discrimination, and is often not a conscious decision. As an organiser, you have the power to raise your participant’s awareness by reminding them that the group expects fair, non-discriminatory play, and that they ought to keep an open mind.
Keep in mind that certain play cultures can greatly value “realism” in looks. When creating a larp with participants from many different cultures, this may influence their attitude towards other participants right from the beginning of the larp. It then becomes even more crucial to manage expectations and clearly communicate your values, especially when the designers’ own play culture is more aimed at inclusivity, which can lead to unspoken norms.
Make sure to also (or mainly) design platonic relationships. If romance and desire are not central to the themes and story of the larp, do not make it the central vector of the relationships you write.
Another tool for larpwrights, if workable with the design, is to refrain from defining the relationship too precisely. A way to do this is to stress what the characters do together instead of what they are to each other, and let them fill in the blanks: is the relationship romantic or a different form of closeness and intimacy?
This freedom makes it much easier to make the relationship work. This method has been successfully used at larps like the Androids trilogy.((Do Androids Dream? (2017), When Androids Pray (2017), and Where Androids Die (2018) by Atropos Studios.))
Make sure to write multiple relationships with enough variation in their nature, both so participants have sturdy fallbacks when facing potential rejection, and so that the participants have examples of other types of relationships that do work for them, and that they can possibly turn the one that is not working out towards.
Communicate to the participants that playing a type of relationship (romance, for example), can take many forms. Romance doesn’t necessarily mean physically close or overly affectionate, and can always be shaped in a way all participants are comfortable with.
Workshops and Preplay
Good workshops are essential, especially if a larp is strongly based on pre-written relationships. Line-up workshops can help to make participants alert that for example character age does not always match participant age. If your larp involves a lot of authority relationships, practice how to play those. Even if romance is not central to the larp, it is still a good idea to create workshops around romance and, if applicable, touch.
This will give people a chance to get to know their co-participants and get comfortable with each other. It is an opportunity to discover chemistry with strangers and to discuss expectations. If people are more relaxed with each other, they are more likely to try to make the larp better for those co-participants.
If you really cannot integrate those types of workshops, at the very least make certain that there is sufficient time before the larp to get to know each other, and encourage your participants to talk to each other about their expectations.
Whether it is an informal conversation or part of a workshop, explicit discussion among co-participants on what they expect and want to play creates confidence and makes it easier to hold each other accountable.
Chemistry is definitely something that can be workshopped. There are many workshops in use to build levels of comfort and understanding for larp, though not all of them well-documented. WILT (2019)((WILT (2019) by Karete Jacobsen Meland and Mads Jøns Frausig.)) is a larp with good examples of these workshops and is available online.
If you want to invite your participants to develop physical chemistry, you can workshop around finding beauty in one another: for example to take one thing they find attractive about the other person and focus on that. Including these types of workshops stresses the fact that chemistry and play compatibility are to some extent malleable, and giving the participants ample time to find that connection increases the chance it will work out.
On the Styx,((On the Styx (2019-) by Evolution Events.)) a relationship-heavy larp, is another example of a game with a set of workshop-exercises specifically dedicated to creating chemistry between the participants of characters in intense relationships. They involve a combination of extended eye contact, physical touch, and looking at and appreciating things about the other, and participants have reported a lot of benefit from those.
If you want to invite your participants to develop general chemistry, you can workshop around what makes the characters fond of each other. For instance, as someone taught me, you can create a workshop to develop character relationships based on statements such as “you like/love me because…” (i.e. “You love me because I always remember to buy you a present after a business trip”). This is a technique that I now personally use in my own larps.
I found that it neatly works around the physical because participants are the ones making decisions about their own characters’ desirable traits, which ultimately makes it easier for them to steer the focus away from their looks.
If your larp is more of a sandbox, be aware that your participants are likely to be more nervous to step out of their typecast due to lack of alibi, and that many, if not most, will revert to personal preferences when picking co-participants for relationships and allegiances.
Unfortunately there is no perfect way to create inclusive relations: having pre-written relationships means there is a chance for lack of chemistry or outright rejection that can hurt a lot, and letting participants make relationships during the workshops or preplay will make for more comfortable play but usually favor the well-connected and conventionally attractive participants.
Keep these things in mind when designing and running team- and relationship-building workshops or other pre-larp activities. Try to take steps to mitigate this effect and address it directly, multiple times if needed: ‘it makes sense to write your character with your friends in mind, but please keep an open mind and involve participants you do not yet know as well. Do not underestimate the power of explicitly communicating values such as openness and personal responsibility to your participants.
Using badges, ribbons or other markers to opt in or out of play types has become somewhat commonplace over the years.
Consider also using physical signifiers for characters to visibly convey meta-information about for example desirability or fame, so the participants are less likely to fall back on their own opinions instead of those of their character.((For example in Dangerous Liaisons (Muriel Algayres, 2019), where a ribbon signified physical attractiveness. For added fairness, the participants were unaware which characters had the physical attractiveness trait when choosing them.))
Be available to mediate if needed. Participants should know that being ignored by their relationships is something the organizers and/or safety persons are here to help with. Making sure there is a culture of trust on your larp is always important, but because voicing these types of concerns feels incredibly vulnerable, it will be tougher for them to trust you with this. By actively checking in with participants and asking them how it is going and how the relationships are working out, you can make it much easier for them to talk about difficult play rejections.
Try to find a sweet spot between helping people change relationships that do not work for them, and making sure they give it a fair chance.
Tips for Participants: How to Be a Decent Co-participant to Everybody
Once the larp starts, the responsibility mostly switches to the participants. Here are some tips on creating positive and inclusive play.
During Runtime
Keep calibrating and communicating with your co-participants. By expressing that a situation makes you nervous, should it be because you are afraid you will not be cool, smart, or pretty enough to do it justice, you can make people more alert and supportive. Give them a chance to help you.
If you do get rejected, take a step back and get support from your co-participants or organizers. Try to not let the feeling fester, and focus on the fact that the rejection says more about them than about you, even if it often doesn’t feel like it: try to actively bring to mind larps in which a similar relationship went well for you.
Then get help from the organizers to find the play aspects you needed from that person in another participant (for instance respect, someone to bully in-game, someone who admires you, etc.), or go to a trusted friend. If you wait until after the larp, it is too late to turn the experience towards the positive again.
Co-participants: be on the lookout for ways to be a fallback for what others drop. I am a big fan of the article “Do You Want To Play Ball” by Josefin Westborg and Carl Nordblom (2017), and even though this framework mostly addresses narrative play propagation, it is applied to characters as well.
When looking for someone to swindle during the soiree it makes sense to immediately go to the charismatic boisterous man in the centre of attention, but is there also someone more in the fringes and does their name tag peg them as a wealthy industrialist? Not immediately going for the easy option is also a skill that can be trained. You can make someone’s larp and who knows, maybe you will discover your new favorite co-participant?
If bad chemistry persists, it can be a good choice to just play the relationship as written anyway, of course depending on the larp specifics and how much it will negatively influence your own larp. Sometimes, making a relation more performative and less intimate can work: the relation can be publically played out, which will lift your co-participant without putting you in a setting that might make you uncomfortable. You might be able to trick your mind and discover that, through performing the relation, you can actually develop an emotion or chemistry, even if it is not entirely based on the other person.
Remember that it is alright if some things just don’t fully work out, as long as you give everybody a chance to have enough good play. We sometimes put so much stock in building that overwhelming, highly immersive experience, that we forget that it doesn’t have to be perfect.
What if the participant of, for example, your very important boss, simply can not pull it off? It is important to still give them the appropriate reaction and lift them as far as is needed for their character to work. If you were really looking for a certain type of play from the relation, for example having an authority figure to look up to, you can then seek some of that play with other characters, rather than undermining your predesigned relation by counterplaying. If we are never given a chance to play something, we are never given a chance to grow and learn.
Depending on play culture, immersion can be valued over co-creation, or the other way around. And when different play cultures come together, misunderstandings arise. Do not assume that the other character understands you are, for example, ignoring them because your character is depressed and you want to immerse in that. It is better to have an extra out-of-character check-in than to have them wonder if your in-game lack of enthusiasm has to do with one of their perceived out-of-game qualities. This can also be a good moment to check how you can help them find other play, which is in this case even more a shared responsibility.
In a panel discussion, one of the participants suggested workshopping a non-intrusive phrase, similar to how we use and workshop safety- or escalation phrases. This phrase should communicate to a co-participant that they seem to be interacting based on the participant’s attributes instead of the character’s, or that they are ignoring an aspect they should lift. Their suggestion was to interject with the sentence “Don’t you know me/them, I am/they are…”, and remind them of the attribute they are ignoring. For example, “Don’t you know me? I am the commanding officer of this unit!” This, or a similar phrase, can be a way to make people aware of their behaviour without interrupting the larp
In larps that use a physical messageboard of sorts to request certain types of play, that board can be made explicitly available for asking people to adjust their attitude towards your character.
It is not always easy to differentiate between what people would like (“I would like to have more torture scenes”) and what they need to be able to play their character (“people need to stop disobeying my orders or I can’t play the general”). However, it is essential to train that skill and stress the difference during workshops: the first is a soft offer that can be negated by, for example, the oppressor participants being out of energy, while the second is quite essential to the larp and should not just be dismissed.
After the Larp
Like with many other aspects of the larp, debriefings are important. Talking after successful in-game relationships in terms of what worked for you and why, can change future larp relationships for the better. You can use this information to get valuable insights in how you personally create chemistry with your co-participants and how you can turn the play around when you are struggling. As part of your individual after-larp process, try to reflect on what made it easy or hard to respect certain roles in terms of status and expertise. Be honest with yourself if that was (partially) to do with how the participant looked.
In Conclusion
Recently, the discourse about larp seems to shift from being very design theory-focused to putting more thought towards participant skills and what happens when we play. I think that is for the better for multiple reasons, not in the least because it stresses that a good larp is a shared responsibility between participants and designers.
To find appropriate tools to approach a complex subject such as participant exclusion, we need to keep talking. We need to keep talking as participants, so that the fear and experience of being excluded can be something that is openly discussed, and so that we can watch out for each other. And we need to keep talking as designers, and make the existence of appearance-based prejudice one of the parameters when making design choices for our larps.
By communicating clearly about desired behavior and values, we can work to truly make our larps as welcoming and empowering as we always hoped they were.
Banaji, Mahzarin R., and Anthony G. Greenwald. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Delacorte Press, 2013.
Kemper, Jonaya. “Wyrding the Self.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta, 2020.
Kemper, Jonaya, Eleanor Saitta, and Johanna Koljonen. “Steering for Survival.” In What Do We Do When We Play?, edited by Eleanor Saitta, Jukka Särkijärvi, and Johanna Koljonen. Helsinki, Finland: Solmukohta, 2020.
Meland, Karete Jacobse, and Mads Jøns Frausig. 2019. “WILT.” Google Drive, last accessed April 24, 2021.
Participation Design Agency. “Is this Larp For Me?” Inside Hamlet, last accessed January 20, 2021.
Vejdemo, Susanne. 2017. “Play to Lift, Not Just to Lose.” In Shuffling the Deck, edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner, 143–46. Carnegie Mellon University: ETC Press.
Westborg, Josefin, and Carl Nordblom. “Do You Want To Play Ball?” In Once Upon a Nordic Larp, edited by Martine Svanevik, Linn Carin Andreassen, Simon Brind, Elin Nilsen, and Grethe Sofie Bulterud Strand, 130-142. 2017.
This article will be published in the upcoming companion book Book of Magic and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
van de Heij, Karijn. “We Share This Body: Tools to Fight Appearance-Based Prejudice at Larps for Participants and Organizers.” In Book of Magic, edited by Kari Kvittingen Djukastein, Marcus Irgens, Nadja Lipsyc, and Lars Kristian Løveng Sunde. Oslo, Norway: Knutepunkt, 2021. (In press).
This is a tool to give yourself a place to rest but do so in character rather than leave the game. You can use this tool if you are going to a game where your character will take you out of your comfort zone or you will portray a heavy theme. This tool works for both prewritten and self-written characters.
A fail-safe in the context of larp can be anything from a state of mind to a physical placement to a method where you can balance the intensity of your game. It’s a means to allow you to stay ingame at times when you are stressed and otherwise might need to go off game. To boil it down, it is about creating room for you while you explore the embodiment of your character.
Questions to ask yourself:
What do you need to relax?
What helps you become centered?
What does your physical and mental safe space look like?
Is it introspective or extrospective?
Is it shared or alone?
What do you need in situations where you are under pressure?
Solitude or company?
Guidance or to lead or control?
Structure or freedom?
Identifying Your Fail-Safes
Here you find the five core personality types known as OCEAN, which is an abbreviation of the five core traits openness, conscientious, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. We are seldom purely one of these types, but we can still use OCEAN to build an understanding of what kinds of spaces and fail safes we can design our game experience around.
Personality type
Type of space
Possible fail-safes
Open
You are very creative and open to trying new things. You focus on tackling new challenges and are happy to think about abstract concepts.
Social
Gravitate towards close relationships where one can share experiences, be it with one carefully selected character/player or in a wider context e.g. where gossip is shared. If you cope well with a distraction (this requires knowledge about what you want/need to avoid) this is an option too.
Conscientious
You spend time preparing and are good at finishing important tasks first. You pay attention to detail and enjoy having a set schedule.
Controlled
Go into relations or scenes that have been negotiated. Focus on making sure you have agency in your relations, i.e. avoid relations where you are dependent on the other players to initiate play. You can also gravitate towards a location when you need to “touch base” with yourself or your group.
Extravert
You enjoy meeting new people and feel energized when you are around people. You may talk before you think. You enjoy being the center of attention, to start conversations and include others.
Public
Thriving in very social and public spaces, you might have a need to go all in and take center stage, be it a literal stage or in dramatic scenes. Being extravert you might also have a need for the opposite: solitude or extra calm places/mindsets. A close (intense)
— not necessarily romantic — relation can be a good place to rest.
Agreeable
You have a great deal of interest in other people and care about others. You strongly feel concern and empathy. You enjoy helping, contributing and assisting others.
Contemplative
As you might tend to be a people-pleaser, make sure you create fail-safes that give you time to reflect on whether or not it’s your needs that are met or your need to accommodate others. You might find enjoyment in having characters that support others — this can be a safe space too.
Neurotic
You worry about many things and you find yourself getting stressed quicker than others. You can experience dramatic shifts in moods. It can take you a while to bounce back from a stressful event.
Familiar
Make sure you have players around you who know you. They can help you stay grounded. Ahead of the game, you should start deciding on physical places you can gravitate towards. If you relax well in contemplation, create fail-safes where you write letters, draw, or read. If contemplation makes you anxious, close relations with whom you can share your (ingame) feelings can help you relax.
The chart offers an overview of the five personality types, what type of space they tend to gravitate towards, and ideas for fail-safes. Use the questions above to start the process of figuring out what safety is for you. Here are a couple of examples.
Example 1 — offgame personality
A player who wants to push their boundaries and play an extraverted character when they are far from one themselves. To accommodate their offgame personality and allow for them to stay in the game the character is designed around several different ways to be at center stage without being in the spotlight. This could be by: always introducing and including new people into conversations (open chair policy). Often seek out new conversation partners and get them to talk by showing deep interest in them. Rarely talk about themselves. And when needed, they could re-treat into a broody and closed mental space alone amidst it all. All these are ways of being deflective: Being in focus but not with attention on them.
Example 2 — offgame energy management
A character at a historic larp has two major themes 1) war trauma, violent, public outbursts of PTSD and 2) homosexuality in an era where this is punishable by death. Both themes have the potential to be extraordinarily heavy and the player is afraid they will end up spending more energy on this portrayal than they have or want to. To balance this out the player put the two themes on each end of a scale, where at each end the intensity are a volatile trauma and overt gayness.
War trauma
Volatile
↔
Homosexuality
Gayness
This allows the player to balance one heavy theme by playing on the other and vice versa, creating room for both in their game experience. Ingame this scale functions as a coping method with two very different life circumstances.
Players may engage in erotic and amorous interaction, in character, in different ways (Stenros 2013). Sometimes the design of the larp tries to avoid arousal, especially due to safety concerns, but there are a growing number of Nordic style larps designed for strong emotions, including sexual arousal, and players steering for that experience.
The question is, how to successfully indulge in that excitement?
Sexual role-playing has been addressed in Nordic larp for the last 20 years (Brown & Schrier 2018). Harviainen notes (2019) that in larps the role-playing activity is in the centre, contrary to BDSM role-play, without digging too deep into solely sexual aspects.
I will question this conclusion and lay out methods by which we can explore the sexual dimensions of larp.
A new trend has emerged in Nordic larp where erotic action seems to be at the core of the player experience. For instance, the many re-runs of Inside Hamlet, Baphomet, Just a Little Lovin’ and the 2019 larp House of Craving have shown that larpers want and are capable of playing with sexual arousal and erotic action. I choose to call these player interactions Embodied Erotic Role-Play — they can be found in larp, in BDSM, and also in private settings or pro-domme settings. They might happen in any larp, especially if the theme is erotic.
Representative symbolic methods, where the player is not meant to feel anything, are not included in this article, nor verbal methods of playing out erotic lust. Of course, sexual arousal might happen because of fantasies, the right person, that adrenalin rush you feel when you are scared, the fetish of larp costumes, etc. But this article is about the times when all players included want to play out (and get immersed in) sexual arousal.
My thinking around sexual arousal is inspired by the sexologist Denise Medico (2019).
There are three steps in my method of handling sexual arousal in character:
First, you need to “feel deep” about what you really want for yourself. Next, pregame (and postgame) the people involved in Embodied Erotic Role-Play should communicate and negotiate, try to “talk true” as much as possible, and then find ways to “adjust arousal” during playtime.
Feel Deep
If you jump directly into negotiating and calibrating with your co-players, you might not realize what you really need. It is easy to say do everything you want to me and hope for as strong emotions as possible. But what would be your most erotic and arousing scene? You need some time by yourself that could be provided during the workshop: close your eyes, breath deep, consider what do you need now? What do you see yourself doing in this larp, with this person or these people?
I find Betty Martin’s Wheel of consent really useful for this phase: Before you start communicating offgame with the one(s) you want erotic role-play with you should be able to answer these questions for yourself:
How would you like to touch me? (take)
How would you like me to touch you? (accept)
You need to be able to allow (or not allow) requests from others of touching you, or how others want you to touch them (serve). This is to understand if you are doing your erotic runtime actions for yourself or the one who ask.
When you know a little more of what you want, you may play The 3-Minute Game (booklet available in many languages, including Danish, English and French) in the workshop with several different people, so that you are more secure and aware before actual erotic negotiations. It is a good exercise to do with the one(s) you plan to heighten in-game sexual arousal with.
Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent.
Talk True (Negotiate Hard)
A couple of methods have been used in many larp workshops (Pan, House of Craving) to create a brave and loving mode for talking and playing more intimately: The loong hugs stretching into awkwardness and staring with acceptance and love into each other’s eyes. Preferably with many more than the ones you have planned to play sex with.
I have made a model (Grasmo, 2019) about how immersion into the fiction and sexual arousal may interact. You can use this when you negotiate Embodied Erotic Role-Play: Would you like to play out your erotic scene in a performative or narrative-driven way. Look at the model (2) to have a tool for more concrete discussions about what you want (draw it on a napkin for yourself) — do you want immersion into the character’s erotic history, without much sexual arousal at the player’s end, or is sexual play the core of your play?
Here are questions inspired by Midori (2017).
What mood do we want to reach? (sexual, erotic, performative, immersive/narrative). Think in more detail what the atmosphere between you should be like. If you draw this on a napkin, you can also stick a straw through which may symbolize maximum/minimum physical contact.
How do we want to reach that mood? Share goes and no-goes, mentally and physically.
How do I hear and see if you are having a good or bad time? Show with the body language of your character.
How do we escalate or de-escalate? Also agree on if you want to play safe (no one gets their feelings or bodies hurt) or brave (we know it is risks involved, and we will be there for each other if something goes wrong).
A part of the negotiation should be practical: Try out some scenes together. To create a brave space (Friedner 2019) go further than you think you would go in-game. Test out different ways of urging each-other on, gently stopping, and hard stops. Change who initiates. A version of this was done in the workshop at Vedergällingen.
Adjust Arousal
The game has started, you are in character and you’re ready for some hot play. It may be just a lustful story, but just as often an extremely abusive and negative narrative may make you happy and horny (See Montola 2010). Remember, plans or consent can always be granted or revoked, because of what you (playing your character) want now. In the worst case you can always walk out of the scene. In the best case, continue to climax. Here are some tips to adjust sexual arousal up or down.
If it feels too much for you, this is some suggestions to minimize sexual arousal:
Do not immerse: make theatrical pre-planned scenes and use symbolic representational techniques.
No or very little touching, avoid eye contact. Use instead a lot of words to stay in your head, not your body.
Rush into and out of scenes without feeling them.
Play on preferences and kinks you do not share.
Think of other things, don’t be present. But be present enough to know if you allow, take, serve or accept what is happening. Stop if it is not what you like.
Of course it is always a good idea to take an off-game break to adjust, but also to be able to escalate or not while staying in character. This might give you another kind of control so that you can feel safe to explore sexual arousal. Talking about bleed after the game is important (Waern 2011) to understand and adjust your arousal to real life but I will not cover that in this article.
If you are interested in erotic role-playing you probably don’t want to minimize the sexual arousal. If you’re steering for that sexual transgressiveness (Stenros & Bowman, 2018), you can train for skills to stay in your state of sexual arousal, while you are in character. Actually sharing the imaginative space together, as inter-immersion (Pohjola 2014), might help you spiral lust upwards. It does not have to be unhelpful to stay in character: normally fantasies help us closer to orgasm, not further away.
You may heighten ingame arousal during your intimate scenes using some of these tips for erotic and sexual embodied play:
Use your breathing. Both to breath deep into your own body, your own loins, and to breathe fire into the other players(s) lust. Sounds and touch go straight into our brain, without filter. Alter with breathing “dog breath”, fast and shallow, it will make you more horny (and maybe a bit dizzy).
Lock eyes with each other, touch, stand close.
Be mindful, focus on breath, the other(s), the sounds. Make lustful sounds and sighs. Remember to use a lot of time (good practise for real-life sex), do not rush.
Eroticize the other and the situation, even if you do not find them attractive out-of game. They are your porn now. Hopefully, they will also give you something that turns you on, as you have planned.
Play on your preferences and kinks, build them into your character, maybe even with a strong backstory on why it means so much (sexually) to your character.
Make rules to keep the space and the play both safe and brave: For instance with other persons (lustfully) watching, with clear rules (like no clothes off, not touching sexual parts).
Stay in the mode you trained for: clear, detailed communication, both with facial expressions, body language and words. The perfect thing about having larp as the frame for erotic interaction is that in most larps you cannot actually performs sex acts ingame — therefore you do not have to act on it. This is a gift that can transfer knowledge, skills and emotions into your real life sexual relationship(s).
Bibliography
Sarah Lynne Bowman (2018): Immersion and Shared Imagination in Role-Playing Games. Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. Routledge.
Ashley Brown & Karen Schrier (2018): Sexuality and the Erotic in Role-Play. Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. Routledge.
Hanne Grasmo (2019): Arousal in Character: Embodied Erotic Role-play in larp and BDSM. World Association for Sexual Health Biannual Conference/International Journal for Sexual Health, Special Edition.
J. Tuomas Harviainen & Tania Sihvonen (2019): My Games are… “Unconventional” — A Literary Cross-examination of Game and BDSM Studies. 3rd Sexual Conference: Play, Turku
Denise Medico (2019): Orientation toward Eroticism: A Critically-Based Proposition for Sex Therapists. World Association for Sexual Health Biannual Conference/International Journal for Sexual Health, Special Edition.
Markus Montola (2010): The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-Playing. Proceedings from Digra 14
Jaakko Stenros (2013): Amorous Bodies in Play: Sexuality in Nordic Live Action Role-Playing Games. Screw The System — Explorations of Spaces, Games and Politics through Sexuality and Technology. Arse Elektronika.
Jaakko Stenros & Sarah Lynne Bowman (2018): Transgressive Role-Play. Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. Routledge.
His tongue slid slowly up his stepbrother’s neck. “I don’t understand why I’m doing this… It is like there is something wrong with this place.” There was a small pause in his movements and a scared look in his eyes as he stared longingly at his stepbrother’s body. Then he continued almost like something was forcing him…
From the webpage of House of Craving (2019), a larp by Tor Kjetil Edland, Danny Meyer Wilson & Bjarke Pedersen.
Do you also enjoy reading an erotic passage in a novel or watching an erotic scene in a movie? Do you like this tingling sense of excitement? Wouldn’t you find it interesting to feel a bit of it in a larp as well?
Do you also tend to chicken out of possible erotic scenes like many of us used to do? Or do you want to try a larp with erotic elements for the first time but are hesitant about it? We wrote this piece for you.
In Wikipedia eroticism is defined as “a quality that causes sexual feelings as well as a philosophical contemplation concerning the aesthetics of sexual desire, sensuality, and romantic love.” In this text, we will use erotic larp as a term for larps that include any elements of eroticism (as defined by Wikipedia) in their design, no matter the extent erotic elements are occurring and no matter if these elements are optional and depend on participant agency or if they are an inherent part of the larp.
Playing on eroticism and desire in larps has become more and more popular within the international larp community in recent years. Such larps seem to bear an increased risk of generating larp regrets and of making participants everything from nervous up to really worried about the potential scenes lying ahead, Here’s how you can make an erotic larp work for you — although this doesn’t replace participating in workshops that are part of the larp design:
Feeling Accepted, Attractive and Desired
There is a lot of research on how representation of bodies in media influences people’s selfevaluation. Advertisements, movies and social media dictate their own idea of what a beautiful, erotic body looks like and the proportion of people who are dissatisfied with their body image or even feel inadequate is far from negligible. There are many larpers who are insecure about their body, about their level of attractiveness, about being accepted, and about whether others would want to play an erotic scene with them.
Feeling comfortable with yourself and your co-participants is key and this is definitely something that can be improved before the game.Get clarity in order to stop worrying! Take initiative and tell people if you want to play erotic scenes with them. Ask if they want to play with you and on what level.
You are probably thinking, but what if I get no for an answer? That will not help me feel accepted and more secure about myself. But the possibility of rejection is a necessary factor of reaching out to other people, and we can try to not make it into anything bigger than it is. Knowing is always better than worrying and then you can both let that be no big deal and play some other content together.
Here are a few tips for how you can help yourself feel like a protagonist in an erotic story:
Prioritize having a costume you feel beautiful in. Clothes you feel well in help you ease into play.
If possible, agree in advance to play a few scenes with someone you feel safe playing erotic content with and who you don’t have anxieties about. This can ease you into play with strangers later in the larp.
Seek out play with someone you find attractive at some level but are not obsessing about in order to get the right type of tension.
When you sense someone else’s attraction to you try to take it in and let it make you feel beautiful instead of dismissing it or immediately worrying about what responsibility you have for following up.
Knowing and Stating Boundaries
Before arriving at an erotic larp, take your time to think about what you may not feel comfortable with. Imagine what kind of scenes could happen at this larp. Are there activities you do not want to take part in? Is, for example, being naked an issue? Or giving somebody a French kiss?
Once you have identified the things that make you uncomfortable, find out if those are absolutely unacceptable for you and if yes, avoid those in the larp and communicate your boundaries to your co-participants in advance. Also, never hesitate to state your boundaries during a larp. Boundaries might change due to your mood, who you are playing a particular scene with or just by chance.
Everybody playing with you will be thankful if you use safety-mechanics and state boundaries. Something many larpers dread is to be told after the larp that they made someone uncomfortable because they failed to pick up on a boundary.
Often people larp because they want to test or push their boundaries. If that is the case with you, take it slow and try to come-up with a stepby- step approach. If being naked is a boundary you want to push, do not force yourself to immediately undress completely but prepare a costume that can be removed piece by piece. Or maybe you decide to just go with nice underwear which will stay on you and the next larp will be when you jump naked into the pool.
Boundaries can also open during a larp. Chemistry with co-participants can make this process very dynamic and it might be a good idea to reassess your boundaries and wishes during the larp to avoid regrets.
Pacing Your Erotic Play
Sometimes in erotic larps things are rushed. Most erotic larps include simulated sex scenes but if you jump into a sex scene with your erotic relation after two hours into playing, what are you going to do for the rest of the larp?
Compare it to movies and ask yourself — do I want this to be a porn movie or do I want it to be an erotic movie? Sex scenes in erotic movies are deliberately placed within a dramatic arc. They can fuel suspension and contribute to the atmosphere. They can be a tool to make a story complete but they alone do not make a good story.
Furthermore, do not forget that there might be other elements in the larp besides your erotic storyline. Too much eroticism might get boring over time so focusing on a good mix of things keeps the larp interesting.
If you prefer transparency you can talk with your potential erotic-relation-partners about pacing. Otherwise just try to pace the game yourself. It can increase the level of erotic tension in a relation if you break off a scene before it ends in a simulated sex scene. Maybe you do not even need a simulated sex scene at all.
Making Sex Scenes Meaningful
During an erotic larp, you might end up acting out sex-scenes. A good sex scene adds something to the story and contributes to your character development. It might represent change in social relationships and deliver new input to others to play on.
You can play around with the expectations and fantasies of the characters. They might not be realized after all. Characters who had sex can have vastly different experiences and interpretations of what happened.
Eroticism Doesn’t Have to be Physical
Last but not least, playing on eroticism doesn’t necessarily involve any intimate or physically close play. Imagine reading erotic poetry to a secret lover without touching them or eating some strawberries lasciviously while sitting at the opposite ends of a table.
What If It Doesn’t Work?
You are at the larp and the erotic larping you were hoping for doesn’t work. You don’t gel with your co-players, you aren’t able to overcome your own anxieties, someone is stressing you out. What do you do?
Have a talk with the organisers or the safety team. It can help to vent and to get suggestions for how to proceed in your play.
Focus on other relations than the one not working for you. If you are up to it, talk with the co-player you’re not gelling with. If that seems too stressful you can de-escalate play to a casual level and move to play with other characters.
Ask yourself if you are focusing too much on pre-game expectations that are not working out. Consider accepting that those didn’t pan out and go into an explorative mode to see if the larp might have other things in store that are interesting and sensual — If all the eroticism just doesn’t work out, explore the other themes of the larp and start creating additional stories. These stories shouldn’t interrupt the play of others but should add new flavors to the experience you are creating together.
Don’t forget to make use of safety mechanics and calibration techniques if something or someone stresses you out. It’s never too late even if you haven’t used them in previous scenes with the same person.
Every time the bandwagon “tell me about a strong memory we shared” runs through my Facebook feed, a big amount of the memories told are from larps. Strong immersive larp experiences stay with us. Lending out our physical bodies and our real emotions to tell stories will of course make these stories stay with us players, as memories integrate with our own pasts, tying us together as a community.
Because this transition from larp to everyday life can be messy sometimes, it may require aftercare. And because larp is what brings our community together, I think more of aftercare as a collective than an individual issue.
The term aftercare is borrowed from the BDSM community, and basically means taking some time after a BDSM scene to recover, transition from intense play back to normal, and take care of each other’s physical and emotional needs. Larpers sometimes talk about the same thing as defucking (Bindslet and Schultz, 2011) or debriefing.
The idea to use the term aftercare in a larp context is hardly new (Grasmo 2011), but after listening to two related talks at Solmukohta 2020: Sarah Lynne Bowman’s keynote on integration and Julia Greip’s talk on safewords for brave spaces, I came to think about it again and wanted to write something on it. So in this text I will share some thoughts on aftercare in a larp context: how to do it and why.
When we larp together, we are responsible for each other’s experience. We have the capacity to give each other very strong positive emotional experiences and to mess each other up quite badly. In my opinion we can absolutely apply the Campsite Rule to larping: “You should leave your co-players in the same, or better, condition than you met them in.”
I learnt the Campsite Rule from sex advice columnist Dan Savage, who coined it about relationships with big age or power differences, as a responsibility the older person has towards the younger. This aspect of it can be meaningful in a larp context as well. Differences in age, larp experience or social status can create power imbalances when we larp, and we have to take them into account whenever we talk about safety and consent. This is perhaps extra important towards young or new players, or players from marginalized groups.
Any participant that leaves a larp disappointed, traumatized, or hurt will have an impact. Both personally — these feelings can be hard to get over and haunt someone for a long time — and for the community as a whole, since these things often end up as inflamed conflicts, or with players leaving the hobby.
Another important aspect to me is that this care primarily is a player responsibility — nothing we should demand as a service from the organizers. They will have their own aftercare needs. Take care of your organizers and prevent them from burnout, and we will get even more amazing games.
Photo by @thiszun from Pexels. Photo has been cropped.
Designing for Leaving the Magic Circle
But when do we actually leave a larp? We enter a magic circle and establish a social contract when we larp together, and for successful aftercare, we need to find common expectations of how far this social contract extends.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been through “the train station scene” after multiple larps: the larp is over, the venue is cleaned out, and the participants are about to scatter off to their respective travels home. And we pretty often just end up standing aimlessly and confusedly in a big group of people, reluctant to leave. Most larpers are used to ritually leaving the first layer of the magic circle — going from characters back into players. But I still haven’t been to one larp where leaving this second layer of the magic circle has been smooth or thought out. Transitioning from a player group sharing trust and care for each other into our everyday selves at many different places is often really confusing. And this is one area where many aftercare needs could be acknowledged and handled better if we knew when and how our social contract ends. When do we actually leave the magic circle?
I have experienced a multitude of ways this social contract confusion makes people feel bad after a larp. I have been the player who desperately wants to talk more with my bleedy larp crush, but feels too needy and clingy to ask them. I have been annoyed that my co-player wants to talk with me much more afterwards than I do with them. I have felt bad for not wanting to engage in post-game group hugs, meetups, and lovebombing, and I have felt really alone and believed no one wanted to hang out with me after larps.
I know I’m not alone in having had these kinds of feelings. And I think we could save ourselves a whole lot of trouble if we talked more often and more openly about aftercare needs and where to go from here before we leave the magic circle of a game.
Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels. Photo has been cropped.
Aftercare Needs: There is No One-Size-Fits-All
So, ok. Aftercare is important. But how do we implement it? Well, unfortunately there is no one-size-fits-all for aftercare. But predicting one’s own aftercare needs and being able to communicate about them is a great player skill to have. And it is a skill that we can get better at with more experience and practice.
Most importantly: Yes. Some larps will require aftercare. Sometimes predictably and sometimes in unpredictable ways. This is normal and this is ok. There is a great deal of useful further reading about different aftercare needs and moods. Some people get post-larp drop, feeling intensely sad after leaving a game (Bowman and Torner 2015). Sometimes it’s post-larp charisma — being filled up with intense positive feelings after a larp, maybe getting braver, bolder, or filled with self-confidence. Many of us have experienced bleedy larp crushes on our co-players, great love and sense of community with people we just met and shared a larp with, the Knudeblues when we have to leave our new amazing friends, or strong feelings of rejection and alienation when “everyone else had a great larp and I didn’t” (Harder 2018; Nilsen 2015).
Over the last 16 years of larping, I have learned a few things about my own general aftercare needs and patterns. Preparing for aftercare beforehand makes me feel better and more safe when I larp.
I know that I usually have a strong need to write down my thoughts or story after the larp, so I make sure I’ll have time and equipment to do that. I also know that I often want to be alone or choose my company very selectively right after a game, so I usually book train tickets in the silent compartment where I won’t feel forced to talk with anyone. Even though I enjoy international larps, another need I usually have after an English larp is to speak my native Swedish, so another comfort is the ability to do that with other players or friends.
Back home, I often make post-game playlists where I mix music related to the game experience with my own soundtrack, as a way to integrate the larp feelings in my own memory. I also generally have a need to indulge in the story told afterwards. For example, I spend lots of time in the participant Facebook group, starting lots of threads and sharing memories and experiences. It does help me to feel safe and really engage during a larp if I know there will be a possibility for me to have these aftercare needs met after the game is over.
Most texts I’ve read on the subject of taking care of oneself emotionally after a larp naturally has a self-care focus. And while self-care comes first, and also is much more predictable and valuable to learn to do than waiting for someone else to take care of us (Dalstål 2020), I also want to share some thoughts about how to aftercare as a player ensemble.
Here, once again, although many good articles have been written on post-play activities and debriefing, there is no one-size-fits-all. Cry it out, do physical labor, tell epic stories, cuddle pile, get drunk together, or dance the night away — any one strategy might be what someone needs and someone else really doesn’t. I assume the keys to good post-play is to base the activities on consent and opting-in, and not try to cast all players’ aftercare needs or wants into the same mould.
One thing I want to advocate for, though, is to communicate about how we want the social contract to extend afterwards before we leave the game site. Maybe decide with co-players when and how we will talk the next time, and try to be open about it. For example, tell your co-players if you feel a need for some distance and to go back to your everyday life without engaging in post-larp discussions. Tell them if you are likely to be very emotional and want to connect a lot. It could be a good idea to talk with people you will be playing close with about your aftercare needs even before the game.
I like the idea of sharing hopes and fears with one’s closest co-players or group before the game. A central part of building a safety to culture is finding trust to be honest and open about what we want to experience in a game and part of that is also communicating about what we fear will happen (Friedner 2019). Talking through the experience afterwards and reviewing those hopes and fears might also be a good debriefing exercise. Many of my larping friends have mentioned this in the context of playing evil or antagonistic characters. A common fear is that people will be afraid of or hurt by you out-of-character, and then it becomes even more important to get picked up and aftercared by co-players.
Also remember that for many players the aftercare needs doesn’t come only two hours after the game, but two days or weeks later. For this reason I like the idea of assigning everyone debrief buddies, because they are a predictable extension of the social contract after the larp has ended that doesn’t depend solely on one’s own ability to reach out and ask for a check in.
To summarize, I think aftercare is a collective, not just an individual issue. Leave the magic circle consciously and honor the Campsite Rule. If we make some shared efforts to make sure larp experiences integrate with the players in a positive and meaningful way, we build trust in the community and get more chances to be bold, brave, safe, and wonderful together. Let’s do that.
Photo by Arthur Brognoli from Pexels. Photo has been cropped.
Role-playing has the potential to have profound transformative impacts on participants. Over the years both personally and professionally, we have received hundreds of stories from players who have experienced dramatic expansions in their worldview, their understanding of others, and their ability to affect change in the world around them as a result of role-play. In our own backgrounds, we can both point to several role-playing experiences that have altered the course of our lives as a result of the realizations and interpersonal connections resulting from them. The sheer number of people interested in implementing role-playing and simulation as tools for education, empathy-building, and skill training attests to the methods’ potential potency (Bowman 2014a). Whether through virtual play, tabletop, or larp, role-playing can change people’s lives for the better when participants are open to expanding their perspectives.
Following our Butterfly Effect Manifesto (2019), we believe that the insights gained from role-playing can become powerful tools to help participants become more self-aware, process “real life” experiences in a community that feels safe, and transform their lives and the world around them for the better. When role-playing achieves any of these goals—whether in subtle ways or with greater magnitude—we call these instances transformative experiences. However, in our view, the role-playing experience itself is only truly transformative if it impacts the participant’s life in some meaningful way after the event. Thus, while an experience may feel transformative in the moment, the integration of that experience is the wider-reaching impact that we are most interested in cultivating. In other words, for a complete transformation to occur, the impact should expand beyond the bounds of the original experience and integrate into one’s daily frames of reality and identity.
We propose that although transformative effects might occur—and certainly do occur—by chance or as a result of intuitive choices that designers and participants make, we can seek to maximize the potential of such impacts through intentional design, implementation, and post-event integration. We argue that designers and players who wish to maximize the potential for transformative impacts should consciously and transparently focus on the following goals throughout the entirety of the process:
Establishing a clear vision explicitly detailing the desired impacts,
Providing environments that feel safe, and
Offering structures and resources for post-event integration at the end of play.
While this article focuses mainly on design and implementation, individual players also can use these suggested approaches independently to increase the likelihood of undergoing transformative impacts from any given role-play experience.
Before we proceed, we should note that careful consideration and implementation of these concepts and processes will not ensure a transformative impact will take place. Experiences vary from person to person and event to event. However, we believe that the more intentional the choices that designers and organizers make in accordance with these principles, the more likely at least some participants will experience a profound shift in their sense of self, perspective, or agency in the world. We strongly recommend that designers and organizers explicitly state their goals before and after the experience in order to create a deeper sense of investment, increased trust with the participants, and clearer focus upon these impacts for everyone involved.
Finally, we believe that informed consent and safety should be at the forefront of this design philosophy. In other words, we trust players to judge for themselves the extent to which they feel comfortable leaning into certain types of content or experiences based on their own emotional, psychological, and physical thresholds. While growth often involves facing our own resistance to change, we do not advocate for pushing participants beyond their limits. Therefore, while we believe that transformative impacts should always be at the forefront of design and implementation choices, concerns about safety and consent are inextricably linked to creating a secure-enough container for such experiences to transpire.
Below are some suggestions for how to intentionally and systemically design for transformative impacts, followed by some examples from our own design backgrounds.
Designing for Transformative Impacts
When seeking to design for transformation, the first step should be establishing a clear vision explicitly detailing the desired impacts upon participants. Although additional categories likely exist, we propose the following impacts, which fall under four broad groups: Emotional Processing, Social Cohesion, Educational Goals, and Political Aims. Note that designing for certain types of impacts—such as therapeutic aims—may require advanced training, consultation with experts, or increased safety measures.
We recognize that any such list can never contain every possible impact that a role-playing experience can invite and any single design can likely only address a few of these aims. Our goal is to provide a concrete tool that enables participants to make conscious choices during the design and implementation processes.
Practical Implementation
As one gets further into the design process, a number of choices are made that can affect the transformative potential of a role-playing experience. Some examples are the setting, format, game structure, practicalities, mechanics, character concepts, safety tools, workshops, and debriefing structures. Conscious implementation is key if designers seek to maximize the potency of these potential impacts.
While choices relating to the larger structure of the game — such as concept, setting, and format — can have a clear influence, in this article, we will limit our focus to the categories of Safety, Workshops/Debriefing, and Character Design.
Safety
Feeling safe to stretch beyond one’s comfort zone without exceeding one’s boundaries is called a growing edge in personal development. Implementation requires creating a secure-enough container for participants to feel that they can surrender into the experience and feel held in the process by the facilitators and co-players. Some recommended structures for intentionally designing safer spaces include:
* The process by which sign-up lists are screened for players whose previous actions have marked them as either unsafe (red flag) or on watch (yellow flag) by the organizers.
** For example, casting players who have a good reputation for providing safe and consensual play in the more sensitive or antagonistic roles.
Workshops and Debriefing
We believe that designing for transformative impacts requires creating an intentional framework for transitioning into and out of the game frame. This framework can include steps for establishing: a sense of communal trust, a shared reference point for the game’s themes, explication of the game’s transformative goals, methods for expressing preferences for play, safety culture and tools, and norms around communication of participant and organizer needs. Workshops before and during the game can help to achieve these goals. Debriefing after the game can aid in the transition back to the frame of daily life.
With these goals in mind, we have constructed the following suggestions for workshopping and debriefing activities:
Pre-game
Safety briefings and practicing tools
Trust building exercises
Establishing character relations
Explaining game mechanics/tools
Practical/Logistical briefings
Contextualization discussions*
Pre-game consent negotiations
Discussing or playing backstory scenes
Mid-game/Breaks
Calibration discussions or exercises
Narration of events occurring between acts
Mid-game consent negotiations
Contextualization discussions*
Self-care or downtime for participants
Co-player care or emotional processing
Organizer care
Post-game
Structured or informal debriefing
De-roling or formalized shifting from character to player
Contextualization discussions*
Narrativizing events taking place after the game, or Epilogues
Integration practices (see below section)
* One important step that is often overlooked in design is contextualization, which can take place at any stage during the off-game periods of role-play. For example, in the larp Just a Little Lovin’, which is about HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, the organizers provide contextualization sections during the workshops before and after each Act break. Contextualization helps the group filter their experience through the lens of the larger social context within which it takes place, an especially important step for role-plays that feature historical, personally sensitive, or politically-charged content.
Character Design
Much of the transformative potential of role-playing lies in the character design, particularly in the relationship between the character and their player. Whether the character is designed by the organizers, by the participants, or both, several considerations are important to keep in mind during character creation and enactment:
Strong alibi vs. Weak alibi: How much responsibility do players feel that they have for their character’s actions?
Close to home vs. Far from home: How close are the characters to the players’ identities and experiences?
Fictional vs. Autobiographical: How close to a player’s actual life events is the character’s story?
Deep character immersion vs. Light role-play: How deeply, intensely, or seriously are players expected to immerse into their character?
Fantastical abilities vs. Mundane: Do the characters and setting have fantastical qualities or are they representative of social realism?
Personal themes vs. Unfamiliar concepts: Are the themes relatable to the players or are the themes new to them?
Bleed management – Maximization vs. Regulation: Does the game intend to maximize the potential for bleed or attempt to regulate it?
Existing social dynamics vs. Constructed: Do the interactions mirror ones familiar to the participants’ lived experiences or are they unique constructions?
Playing with strangers vs. Playing with familiar people: How well do the players know one another?
High status vs. Low status: How much status and responsibility do the characters have in relationship to one another?
As with any of these implementation considerations, we cannot be certain that a particular design choice will lead to a transformative impact. For example, we cannot assume that playing a character similar to the self with a particular set of emotionally-charged life circumstances that the player finds relatable will inevitably lead to bleed or deep insights about one’s daily self. However, we find it important to recognize that certain design choices can influence the way in which a character is experienced by the player and the potential impacts those experiences may have on the person moving forward.
Facilitating Integration
The discussion about “when a role-play ends” is ongoing. Some players argue that play ends when the organizers decree that players should drop character. Others consider the processing that players undergo in the days, weeks, months, and even years following an event to also be part of the experience. Extreme views posit that a role-play ends the moment the last person to participate passes away, as all living memory would have passed with them. For our part, it seems evident that many external and internal processes do not end the moment that play does, which means that these processes have the potential to lead to a transformative impact if the participant sufficiently integrates insights gleaned from the role-play into daily life.
Thus, we believe that conscious implementation of integration practices after a role-play is crucial to support these transformative changes. Integration is the process by which players take experiences from the frame of a game, process them, and integrate their new awarenesses into their self-concept or the frames of their daily lives. Integration can range from small observations that shift one’s worldview to large-scale changes in identity or the structure of one’s life after the experience.
Below are examples of integration practices in which players may engage on their own initiative or guided by organizers. In an attempt to provide structure, we propose the following six broad categories: Creative Expression, Intellectual Analysis, Emotional Processing, Returning to Daily Life, Interpersonal Processing, and Community Building.
Creative Expression
Some players choose to integrate their experiences by creating new works of art, including:
Journaling
Studio art
Performance art
Game design
Fiction writing
Storytelling
Co-Creation
Intellectual Analysis
Players may also engage in cognitive processing where they seek to analyze their experiences on an intellectual level, including:
Contextualization
Researching
Reframing experiences
Documentation
Theorizing
Applying existing theoretical lenses
Reflection
Emotional Processing
Participants often find valuable the ability to emotionally process their experiences, either individually, one-on-one, or in a group setting:
Distancing identity from undesirable traits/Behaviors explored in-character
Returning to Daily Life
On a psychological level, participants sometimes find a variety of practices useful in helping them transition from the headspace of the game frame to that of their daily lives and identities:
De-roling
Managing bleed
Narrativizing role-play experiences
Distilling core lessons/Takeaways
Applying experiences/Skills
Engaging in self-care/Grounding practices
Transitioning between frames of reality
Incorporating personality traits/Behaviors
Interpersonal Processing
Some participants find social connections important after a role-playing experience, which helps them transition from the social frames of the game to their off-game interpersonal dynamics:
Connecting with co-players
Re-establishing previous social connections
Negotiating relationship dynamics
Sharing role-playing experiences with others
Engaging in reunion activities
Note that some role-play experiences can dramatically shift a player’s interpersonal life, e.g. romantic bleed leading to a daily life relationship, new friendship groups forming, etc. Other times, existing relationship dynamics may help players ground back into their daily life while the new experiences from role-play are being integrated and processed.
Community Building
Some players take the lessons learned in role-playing further, deciding to create or transform the communities around them:
Networking
Planning events
Collaborating on projects
Creating new social systems
Sharing resources and knowledge
Establishing safer spaces
Creating implicit and explicit social contracts
Engaging in related subcultural activities
Evolving/Innovating existing social structures
These lists are not intended to be exhaustive and no participant is likely to wish to engage in all of these activities after role-playing. However, our goal is to provide a framework for designers, organizers, and players to use in order to intentionally integrate their experiences into the flow of their lives after an event.
Examples of Designing for Transformative Impacts
We shall now discuss ways in which we have designed for transformative impacts in our own work to provide concrete examples of how one might consider this process from start to finish.
In the larp Epiphany (2017), co-written with Russell Murdock and Rebecca Roycroft, Sarah Lynne Bowman included concepts from White Wolf’s Mage: the Ascension within the framework of a weekend-long spiritual retreat. Epiphany invited players to enact characters who were quite similar — in some cases, nearly identical — to their daily selves. These characters were designed in collaboration with the organizers; players detailed which personal content they wished to explore through an extensive questionnaire, which the writers translated into a character sheet. While the characters had magical abilities, the goal of the larp was for players to explore their own spiritual and philosophical beliefs and share their personal perspectives and practices with one another within the fictional framework. This goal was explicitly stated in the first paragraph of the design document, meaning that players knew they were explicitly opting-in to close-to-home, personal play:
The setting is a weekend self-help Epiphany Retreat where adults learn how to access their inner potential. Over the course of the larp, mentors will guide initiates through an Awakening into their own magical power through a series of classes and rituals. Participants will socialize and discuss metaphysical principles with one another as they learn to expand their consciousness and personal power. The goal of Epiphany is to play characters similar to ourselves that explore issues of philosophical paradigm, empowerment, and enlightenment. (Bowman, Murdock, and Roycroft 2017)
This slippage between character and player allowed some participants to explore aspects of themselves within the frame of the larp that led to insights and even life changes after the event was over. The larp featured: safety mechanics, consent negotiations, a post-larp Reflection Hour where participants could make art, write, or contemplate their experience, formal debriefing, and informal sharing in the Facebook group and chat after the event. These aspects of the design were intended to establish a secure enough container for players to lean into exploring growing edges within themselves through the frame of the game and character, while also giving participants tools to process and integrate those experiences after the event. For an example of such processing, see the documentation piece by Clio Yun-su Davis, Morgan Nuncio, and Jen Wong. Documentation itself can be an important integration process for participants, along with journaling, story writing, and other forms of creative output.
Another quite different example is how Kjell Hedgard Hugaas and Karijn van der Heij are in the early design stages for a larp called The Mountain, inspired by the song of the same name by Steve Earle. Set in a small mining community in American coal country, the larp centers on a mining accident that captures the world’s attention and promises to change the way of life in the sleepy town forever. While the expected participants are likely to be mostly middle class and quite politically progressive, the characters that populate the town are almost exclusively working class conservatives. As such, The Mountain aims to educate the participants on a subject matter that is most likely unknown to them, broadening their understanding of actions taken by people that they perceive as being very different from themselves, and increasing their understanding of the lived experiences of others.
In order to achieve these aims, the larp leans heavily on concepts and structures that are already familiar to the participants, such as family, romantic love, shared dramatic/traumatic experiences, and so on. By applying these already familiar concepts, the designers hope to create a sense of belonging that allows for emotional connection and intensity to occur even in a somewhat unfamiliar setting for the participants.
By allowing players to connect with experiences far from their own, the larp’s intended impacts are to increase empathy, promote prosocial communication, and build cross-cultural understanding. Additionally, by highlighting the oppressive systems that underpin the setting on both a social and a political level, the designers aim to raise awareness, promote political activism, and build bridges across a deep political divide. Thus, The Mountain will focus upon several transformative impacts in one larp experience, while still providing a tightly focused narrative concept and setting.
We’ve Only Just Begun…
Although role-playing is enjoying a Golden Age at the moment, we believe that our communities have only begun to scratch the surface of the potential of the medium. While we acknowledge that desiring to role-play for entertainment is an entirely valid motivation, we seek to provide tools for participants to use role-playing experiences as a means to transform themselves and the world around them in positive ways. We look forward to what the future will bring in terms of role-play design, innovation, and integration.
Selected Bibliography
Below are a few recommended resources to consider when designing for transformative impacts and building safety structures. We also suggest joining the Facebook group Larping for Transformation for more discussion.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2014a. “Educational Live Action Role-playing Games: A Secondary Literature Review.” In The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2014. Edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman. Los Angeles: Wyrd Con.
Nilsen, Elin. 2012. “High on Hell.” In States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World. Edited by Juhana Pettersson. Helsinki, Finland: Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
This article is partially a complement to the recent ”The Brave Space” opinion piece, but is more generally fueled by long standing discussions regarding status and social dynamics in larp communities, both at the local and wider international scale. It represents my opinion alone and does not mean to establish a universal truth regarding these issues. I will first present a definition of safety and expand it using the notion of zone of proximal development, an education theory proposed by Lev Vygotsky. I will then reintroduce the notion of social capital to argue why imbalances of power between participants should be taken into account while discussing safety and player negotiation of boundaries. I conclude with the idea that you can’t discuss a culture of trust without addressing social capital and the imbalances of power between all people involved.
The Ideal Purpose of Safety
Safety techniques as they exist at the time of this writing provide means to both opt-out of sensitive issues of scenes or to opt-in to certain types of play. Furthermore, communication around safety has become essential to establish the role and positioning of the larp organization on safety and inclusion of all players. We can admit that talk of safety mostly focuses on opting out mechanics, such as clear author statements with explicit trigger warnings, safewords, white zones, stating boundaries, etc. However, opt-in mechanics also exist, such as the signal light colors (red/yellow/green), okay check-in, pre-scene negotiations, opt-in color ribbons, and the more recent zoning, which creates opt-in spaces within the physical space of the larp. While the possibility to calibrate opt-out and opt-in is obviously central to giving participants the opportunity to experiment and step out of their comfort zone, each participant has different needs and boundaries in that regard.
Photo: Laflor for Getty Images/iStockphoto.
In education, Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (Harland 2003) is considered the ideal space to learn. The zone refers to the space between the comfort zone of what you already know and a yet unattainable zone where the difficulty would discourage or overwhelm you (see Figure 1). We can apply this frame to understand how players can develop skills in larp, such as speaking in public, brawling, handling sensitive issues or emotionally charged conflicts, and even intimacy or sexual scenes.
Let’s keep in mind that the zone of proximal development is unique to each individual, in the same way as triggers and boundaries are (Brown 2014). As in education, if a player stays too much in their comfort zone, they might miss the opportunity to grow, experiment, and learn. And in larp, some people explicitly prefer to stay within their comfort zone for a variety of reasons, such as escapism, socialization, or love of a certain genre, all of which are absolutely valid. Furthermore, pushing someone out of their zone of proximal development too quickly can be damaging to the players’ development by forcing them to engage with problems that they are not ready for or that could be triggering for them. Brown (2014) especially underlines how triggers exist on a wide spectrum, and how they can be detrimental to their player’s whole experience and impact the player’s agency.
Therefore, the core idea is that you need a solid comfort zone before you can expand it. The scope of your zone of proximal development is completely personal and calls for personalized handling. Another educational parallel can be drawn here with the notion of scaffolding in education, where progress is built through progressive steps, support from educators, and interactions with other learners. Applied to larp, in order for a person to feel brave and explore out of their comfort zone, they need to feel safe and supported by their environment, which is not a given in larp communities for many players.
Figure 1: The Zone of Proximal Development. Figure by Dcoetzee (CC0).
There is no denying that larp can provide powerful transformative experiences. Jonaya Kemper (2017) coined the term emancipatory bleed to reflect on the process of steering towards a specific type of play that would reflect one’s own life experience of oppression. Players should be allowed the opportunity to steer towards that kind of play, and designers can support emergent play along those lines. However, how can we support transformative play and exploration while still ensuring safety for those players who most need it? This question usually brings up issues of consent, pre-game or in-game negotiation, and personal boundaries.
We are Not Equal in Setting Boundaries and Tone
In the international larp community, we usually remind participants that the players are more important than the game, make sure that enthusiastic content is given and can be revoked at all times, and support negotiation and opt-in mechanisms. Our goal is to build a collective culture of trust. However, to build such a culture, we need to be able to negotiate it as equal participants. I don’t believe that every negotiation and every discussion is carried on an equal footing.
Games going through reruns and several iterations can sometimes be played more violently or intensely from one session to another. Framing the game experience with hard limits or requirements for consent negotiations in such a way that it sets up cohesive boundaries for the whole experience remains an organizers’ prerogative. However, I would contend that the collective level of intensity is also influenced by the players through their collective interactions. Since we tend to take cues and ideas from other players, I believe that participants are unequal in influencing the tone and intensity. Outspoken participants with a wider comfort zone can influence the game atmosphere more, sometimes for the better, by inspiring others and creating unexpected interactions.
On the other hand, a single or small group of participants who decide to play for their own agency and to disregard the collective buildup of the game can just as easily derail the tone and cohesion for the whole larp. These are rare occurrences where the domino effect can negatively impact the experience of many players (Bowman 2017). My previous article (2019) on the depiction of rape scenes in larps showed how the introduction of scenes featuring sexual violence used to be the province of a dominant group who used it for power play. Only the introduction of restrictions and safety regulations enabled the minority group — women players in this instance — to refuse playing these scenes if they were not negotiated. Further down the line, we found women participants were willing to play rape scenes for dramatic purposes or to support intense narratives because they feel empowered to choose to do so. This empowerment, though, was entirely contingent upon a corrective intervention upon the social imbalance that had originally prevented these players from voicing their discontent. Thus, safety culture was the crucial thing that allowed these women to feel comfortable to play this content.
Social Capital in Larp
Social capital is a notion popularized among others by Pierre Bourdieu as the product of resources conferred due to integration into a certain network and the capacity to act in society (Siisiainen 2003). The chart below illustrates social capital as an aggregate of these resources that allows an individual access to favors or greater resources.
Figure 2: A synthetic representation of social capital (Algayres 2019).
Since larp groups or organizations are part of society, they are also prone to the same biases that affect us in daily life. Although efforts have been made to support the integration of minority or marginalized groups in larps, some players still accrue social capital by virtue of being or passing for white, straight, cis-, or because of their class and education level. Another major point in the international context is their mastery of English, which will confer advantages to native English speakers and players from countries where English proficiency is especially high, as well as highly educated and internationally-integrated professionals. Finally, social capital as we will discuss it is also dependent on larp-specific criteria: being geographically anchored as Nordic, clout as an organizer and/or larp theorist, visibility on social media, participation at international larp conferences and conventions, playing high status characters, and involvement in high-profile games with a lot of hype.
I would claim that larpers with higher social capital are in a position to influence their co-players’ choices or leverage their own desires when boundaries are negotiated. Has anyone ever been accidentally pushed out of their comfort zone for fear of missing out certain parts of the game or the opportunity to hang out with this cool larper they’d read a lot about? Could peer pressure and “hardcore larp culture” ever push some people to willfully step out of their zone of proximal development because that’s what a “good larper” would do? I would contend that this can happen, and that it is very easy to be blind to your own social capital, as it can intersect with other forms of oppression. For example, as a woman, I have to contend with sexism and have even been the subject of sexual violence. However, since I hit almost every other marker of status, I have often been in situations where I benefited from my higher social capital and I was sometimes blind to it to my own detriment. I believe it is important for us to acknowledge our own degree of social capital and how it may influence our relative abilities to push play in our desired direction. It is also important for us to listen to people with lower social capital when they request greater safety culture around sensitive topics.
Regarding the Creation of Safe Spaces and Trust Culture
I think that safety must be used both as a way to opt-out and opt-in of specific themes and scenes. However, safety also has been used to protect minority groups and players with specific triggers and limits from play that would be oppressive to them, and is especially beneficial to players with lower social capital (Kemper 2017). In larp scenes where safety was introduced more recently, resistance to safety techniques usually comes from the more dominant and entitled groups of players. These groups sometimes feel that safety techniques are not necessary because they feel safe enough not to need them. They may have sufficient trust and familiarity within their local communities of play to feel safe without negotiation, which is a form of privilege that is not afforded to many in the international larp community, who may enter larps without the benefits of established group trust. Only active communication by the organizers compensates for this imbalance of power between groups that feel confident to play without safety rules and those who need to be sure of the implementation of safety structures before they will even sign up for the larp. In other words, players with this social capital privilege may not realize that lack of safety culture in a larp may be actively dissuading players from marginalized backgrounds from ever signing up, which further contributes to issues of inclusion in the international larp community.
I don’t believe we can discuss expanding our boundaries, reducing the need for scene negotiations, or exploring out of our comfort zones without taking into account imbalances of social capital, influence, and power. Discussion around opt-out safety was once framed around the protection and benefit of marginalized groups and players most in need of it. I would therefore wish for discussions around trust culture to be built around this issue: how can we build a trust culture that will above all benefit players with the lowest social capital and the greatest need for it?
I hope that we will develop tools that can enable players to explore and expand their comfort zone. However, when we develop these tools, we should measure their value on how much they actually empower those with the lowest social capital and facilitate a sense of psychological safety. I believe that our capacity to build a collective sense of trust will only be as big as our capacity to compensate for these imbalances and support all players to feel safe doing so.