Nordic Larp

Tag: sexuality

  • Debauchery: Fantastic

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    Debauchery: Fantastic

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    Recently an article was republished from this year’s Solmukohta book, “Debauchery: Meh” (Anonymous 2024), that caused quite a stir in the community, on the subject of “erotic larps”, that is larps with sex as a central theme. Plenty of people within our community have made their own assessments over this week, but I’d like to take the time to offer up some thoughts. And naturally, the shorter the original comment, the more I have to say about it.

    So, why do we larp?

    A simple question to be sure, and perhaps a bit pretentious for the start of an essay talking mostly about filthy sex, though as anyone who has played a larp can say, the answers are broad and complex. No shortage of ink has been shed across this very outlet on the topic, and yet my anonymous friend in the original comment has surmised that in the case of “erotic larps” that the principal, and perhaps even sole, driver for people attending is sexual gratification. 

    Whilst it is no surprise that many people had some quite robust criticisms of this idea, I think it’s worth exploring not just why this is wrong, but the range and diversity of why these larps may appeal to people.

    A Confession

    Here is the point though where I need to make a confession: I haven’t actually ever been to an “erotic larp”. I have played sexually-charged characters and stories in other larps, such as being the paramour of a doomed warrior and part of her polyamorous entourage, to playing the latest “acquisition” to a sexy vampire cult, amongst others; but I have never been to a larp where sexual or kink themes were central to the design.

    So I should probably stop writing now then, eh? I don’t know the genre in question intimately (heh), I haven’t experienced the plotlines, the events, the hype; I don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, perhaps, and if that is your opinion then I bid you a good day. But I feel whilst I haven’t had much to do with “erotic larp”, I am both (in my own humble opinion) a fairly experienced larper across a range of genres, and would like to share some credentials in a vain attempt to restore some credibility.

    Hi there, my name is Abbie, and I have been at various times in my adult life: a sex worker, both escort and porn, a volunteer at a sexual health service, a trans and disability sexual liberation activist, an organizer and host of a series of sex parties, and a sex & kink communicator, including getting to be on radio to talk about the Sex Without Shame campaign we ran some years ago. I’ve also happily had no shortage of romantic and sexual experiences in my life, so when it comes to that topic, I think I am broadly qualified.

    Exploring Ourselves

    But it’s my time with the Sex Without Shame campaign that I’d like to talk about most here. This was, as the name suggests, a campaign set up to encourage people, mostly queer and LGBTQ+ people, to explore their sexuality freely, and hopefully feel more comfortable and confident in experiencing sex and kink. My part of it (aside from doing a sexy photoshoot with a lovely Leather-Daddy named Frank, where we both admitted that it was to us the most heterosexual thing either had done in a long time) was mostly presenting seminars and workshops as part of the women’s programme. These workshops covered all sorts of topics, from sexual health and contraception to exploring sexual attraction and alternative relationships, but one important one was the ‘Wall of Kinks.’

    In this exercise, everyone would anonymously write a kink, fetish, sexual fantasy, or anything similar onto a post-it note, and place them into a bag at the start of the session. I would then empty out the notes, and put them up on the wall, and we’d discuss them. Part of the exercise was to break the taboo a bit, both personally and as a group, to show that these are the things the people in this room are into, and how that’s okay, natural, and can be explored and experienced safely and confidently. It was often a highlight of the series for me, as it was often the most transformative bit for participants.

    So this is a bit of a long personal ramble before I get to how-to-make the lasagne, but I think it’s important. Because the biggest point I wanted to make before getting to the other topics is this: if you use larp as a place to explore your own sexuality, in whatever form that takes, then that’s absolutely fine. If you communicate and are open about what you’re looking for, then you go right ahead. Because I know from the experience of running those workshops, that there aren’t a whole heap of places to safely explore parts of who you are, and sexuality is absolutely a core part of ourselves. So if you’re communicating, seeking consent, and being honest, then you’re doing larp right, and I don’t want anyone telling you otherwise. 

    And I don’t really think my anonymous friend would disagree, but I really wanted to make that part clear.

    Exploring Others

    Okay, so that’s one reason people might play “erotic larps”, to explore themselves and their own feelings in a safe environment. So what are the others? Well, they’re as myriad as the reasons people play any other sort of larp. And for that I’d like to share about why I don’t, or more accurately haven’t, been to any “erotic larps”. Because from reading my little CV up there you might well say “these larps look like they’re right up your street, Abbie,” and in some ways you’d be right. But that’s sort of the point isn’t it.

    A common reason for why we larp is to get to experience the lives of others. I will never forget, to my dying breath, the fear and loneliness of being a WW1 nurse, or the righteous fury of being a maniacal paladin, or the crushing loss of being a cursed raider doomed to be hunted for eternity through the forests. These experiences, these emotions, these deep and resonant lives of people I’ve lived, even for a short while, will stay with me forever, just as I know they do in the minds of fellow larpers. I will probably never in my life get to really experience the anxiety and love of shepherding a gaggle of nurses across Siberia, or the confidence and bravery of charging into a battle I know will kill me. That’s a big part of larping: to experience things from lives we will never see ourselves.

    Now this is also a big part of why I don’t often play disabled characters at larps. I live that, every day of my life. Whilst playing a disabled person in a very different context to my own is neat, and I’ve done that on occasion, on the whole, playing what I experience (and usually a bad experience) in life isn’t all that fun. Just for the same reason I don’t often play trans or non-binary characters at larp, a sentiment I have heard echoed by other larpers from those demographics. However, I do pretty much always play gay or bisexual characters, because that part of my life is pretty damn great, and so getting to be that in different contexts and in new and exciting ways is brilliant.

    But sexual liberation falls somewhere between the two. It’s certainly not a bad experience whatsoever for me, far from it, but it’s also not really much of a departure from who I already am. There wouldn’t be tremendous appeal to me in playing a character that was about being sexually confident, liberated, and getting to experience those feelings. But to someone for whom that isn’t a part of their everyday, I can see how that would be an especially enticing premise, just as getting to live any other life beyond our own is in larp. Experiencing the deep empathy of living another person’s life is one of the most amazing things about this medium, and I’m sure this can be a real draw to people to play “erotic larps”.

    Experiencing the life and perspective of others with a vastly different outlook from us, perhaps an outlook we admire, or one we are glad we don’t share, allows us to reframe how we see the world and the people in it. And whether that is seeing social interactions, positive and negative, through the mind of someone with a different outlook on sex and sexuality, can be a hugely moving adventure.

    So people might want to explore their own lives through “erotic larp”, they might want to explore lives of others… what else? Well you’ll notice that I didn’t actually give a proper answer in that section as to why I haven’t been to any “erotic larps”, and you might surmise that it was that they don’t differ from my own life enough to be appealing. But you may also recall me saying earlier that I have played sexual and romantic characters and stories in larps, so there must be something there that interests me?

    Well that’s because the honest answer is that I haven’t been to any “erotic larps” because of the very usual reasons: expense and travel. Most of the ones have been overseas, and my budget for international larp is limited, and none of them have ever broken the threshold of interest to make me want to commit my precious time and money to them when other priorities existed. Except one.

    Exploring Power

    I did in fact, some years ago, try to go to an “erotic larp”. This being Nocturne (2022) by Atropos Studios, a historical larp set in a brothel during the American Revolutionary War. In the end I didn’t get a place as numbers were quite tight, but I’d like to talk about what appealed to me in this larp over others. Firstly, for anyone who knows me, I am an absolute slut for a historical larp. They’re the main genre I play, write, and work on, and as a historian by background it’s fairly obvious why. So that alone already moved it up above the threshold of interest, but it wasn’t all of it.

    And I think this is where I make my biggest departure from the thoughts of my anonymous friend, because now we’re getting into the territory of “what does sex mean?” And that is a very interesting question that I think larp is an exceptional medium to explore. In the two cases I outlined at the start where I played a sexual story at a larp (there are others naturally, but these two I think best exemplify my point) the meanings they each had were quite different.

    For the romance with the doomed warrior, myself and the other members of their entourage were engaged in the traditional hedonistic lifestyle. The warrior knew she was bound to die soon, as did most of us around her, and so the sex there was about attraction, living for today, and the platonic ideal of hedonism. In the other, the being an “acquisition” to the vampires, that was much more about power, dominance, the symbolic expression of sex in possession and control. And my interest in Nocturne, skewed towards the latter.

    Now I want to reiterate, I didn’t end up playing the game, and beyond signing up and reading the provisional material for the first run I have no knowledge of the design or the actual content of the game, so I don’t really have anything to say on the game itself. But I do want to talk about what it was that appealed to me in the premise.

    It was specifically one character, the sister of one of the soldiers. So in the outline, the players are split into two cohorts, the brothel workers, being women, and the soldiers, being men. But there was one woman amongst the soldiers, being the sister of one of them who I presumed would be something of an assistant to the soldiers, what we would call a “camp-follower”. And reading that made me go “Oooh, that’s interesting”. 

    I am sure I would’ve had a plenty good time playing amongst the women of the brothel, as there’s a whole range of personalities and stories you could explore in that setting. You’ll perhaps notice that the two cases I’ve mentioned had me playing in a more submissive role, which to someone who is more often on the dominant side of the dichotomy has its own appeal, that would be present here. But that one character, the woman who would be split in loyalty between fellow women and the soldiers to whom she was bound, that would make for one compelling plotline.

    And of course there’s many ways one could play such a character and I didn’t get any more information on how she was written or eventually played by anyone. But for me, my intention was (if I was successful in getting a ticket and then in getting that character, neither of which came true) was to take the character in quite a dark direction, to be a willing, perhaps even slightly sadistic participant in the oppressive play that would no doubt have been central to the content of the game. And that exploration of themes, in a historical setting was very enticing to me. Everything after all, to get my obligatory pretentious quote in for the article, is about sex; except sex. Sex is about power.

    And maybe my anonymous friend agrees, maybe they feel that the “erotic larps” should be about so much more, that they could explore themes of dominance, power-structures, the leveraging of sex as a means of social control both in limiting and embracing it. Larps could give players a window into what sex means, exploring the deeper questions of morality and power, and let them live the lives of both those elevated and those crushed by sex. Whether they do or not alas lies out of my experience to say.

    Sex Sells

    Yet they still seem to feel that despite these important and meaningful topics to explore, “erotic larps” remain an “overrated” genre.

    Whilst I must admit, in my own circles I haven’t experienced much of this rating, as I don’t find “erotic larps” to be held with the sanctity they appear to be in other circles, there certainly is a perception from parts of the community that this is so. Where the prestige and prominence these types of larps seem to hold comes from is an important topic, but perhaps best explored by someone from those corners.

    Though I might offer a simple thought at least on the point of popularity, rather than prestige, and it is the evergreen notion that sex sells. From working in marketing on a few occasions, I can say from personal anecdote, that depictions or even mere implications of sex sell products, whether that be films like I was selling, or larps as here.

    I think it would be arrogant for me to claim that larpers are somehow not susceptible to those same hooks in our monkey-brains as everybody else. And whilst I absolutely do not believe that any larp producer is using sex as a marketing hook to sell tickets, it’s hardly outside the realm of possibility that in a sea of available larps, for some of us, those that light up the horny neuron in our brain might subconsciously seem a little more appealing. And in the current environment, where budgets are tight, and so many larps are struggling to make ends meet, it may only take a little bit of a marketing bump to take a larp from the edge of feasibility into safe territory, where other larps struggle to get exposure.

    So between this appearance of popularity, real or imagined, and the prestige they carry in certain circles, I can at least begin to understand why my anonymous friend might feel upset at these productions, even whilst I profoundly disagree with their assessments. Times are hard, and we all want to elevate the sort of experiences we enjoy and cherish, and it is demoralizing seeing projects you care for fall by the wayside to productions you’re not enthused by. 

    Though, it seems there are at least a fair few reasons besides sexual gratification that someone might want to play a larp with sex as a central theme, and no shortage of stories, meanings, and levels of emotion to explore through them. So I hope if it is your thing, or think it might be, that you’ll give them a go, and I have no doubt that those producing them will continue to improve their craft, as we all do.

    And to my anonymous friend: I hope you find forms of larp, and people to experience them with, that speak to you, and get to enjoy your favourite flavours with joy and abandon. I could wish nothing more for any of us.

    References

    Anonymous. 2024. “Debauchery: Meh.” Nordiclarp.org, August 7.

    Cover photo: Photo by Emojibater and Rosie Simmons on Unsplash. Image has been cropped.

  • Beyond Cracking Eggs

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    Beyond Cracking Eggs

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    JM: Now that we have more people talking about larp, a lot of people say “larp taught me that I could be another gender.” That’s a great conversation that we’ve now had a few times, so what is the next conversation? What’s next after “larp can teach me that I can be different”?

    ES: I would say that it can teach you how to be different. Gender is a thing we do, and having an environment where we can actually learn — I mean, my first Inside Hamlet was the first time I ever tried to perform that specific kind of high femininity.

    AN: I was thinking about skills. It can take years to feel comfortable with the most basic skills of performing the gender role that you want to be reflected as.

    JM: I’m what, eight years in? And I’m finding that I don’t feel like I’m getting so much more comfortable with the skills as much as getting comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. There are definitely people and situations where I still have no idea how to interact.

    ES: It gets easier. There are still things that feel weird and fraught—but there are so many things that I’ve also stopped noticing are skills; I don’t realize they’re learned anymore.

    AN: But there’s also some danger to larp being talked about in this sense. How do we talk about what it is that we do? Because there’s no way to make that immune from someone saying “well, this is just an act” – reducing it to clothing and skills. We didn’t just put on the dress or the suit, we put on the skills, and they don’t want environments where people can learn these skills and become comfortable with them. They don’t want us to exist. Maybe let’s not get too depressing here, but I think that’s what is radical about larp spaces: they can be a place where you can learn.

    JM: Most people don’t actually want that liberation.

    ES: To that I would say they’re going to try to kill us regardless, so making ourselves smaller isn’t going to stop it. My answer to that is to ignore it, and even to be explicit about this — here is the fraught thing, and we choose to ignore it. But skills are an interesting frame because body language isn’t a skill. You’re literally restructuring your peripheral nervous system to have different kinds of reflexes, right? You could argue that performance plus time is part of physical transition.

    JM: Like fluency?

    ES: Deeper than that, it’s physiological.

    JM: Maybe similar to the way when you start to think in a new language and react in that language – you don’t forget your original one, but for a long time they can get mixed up.

    *****

    SS: As a player, I find it useful to have access to queer history and other queer experiences. And to play your own oppression, because it can be very liberating to fuck with it. But as the backlash against queer people has been growing, our queer games have become more sanitized; people don’t want to play on things they experience in real life. People playing the oppressors are scared of playing the oppressors.

    JM: If you can’t have the oppressors in these games, you also lose out on the possibility for liberation.

    SS: Exactly, and that’s what’s been bugging me. One of the things larp can do is let us see the oppression and act against it.

    AN: We have to workshop people to get them to play mean and nasty!

    JM: In The Future is Straight I played the head of the conversion camp and used this very nuanced, caring kind of normative oppressor — the counselors and I would do these horrible scenes and then meet up in the kitchen to cry. But at the end I didn’t feel horrible, I felt intensely grateful to anyone who had done any of that work, who had stood up to this in the past and now. But can trans liberation and larp overlap?

    ES: I mean, we know larp is a very bad tool for doing politics because it doesn’t scale. But learning history in a very deep way is one of the places where it can be useful. Like, this is what it meant to come out as trans 15 or 20 years ago. Or the fight between the leather dykes and the conventional pride ecosystem in 1980 and ‘81. Understanding how we survived previously and how we fought is a direct survival mechanism.

    JM: But are the kids even interested in history yet?

    ES: Larp lets us create scripts for talking across generations. We don’t really have scripts for talking to our elders because they died, or went stealth.

    JM: And there’s an active campaign to prevent us from interacting with young people.

    *****

    JM: Sometimes I go into a larp thinking I want to consciously play with a particular part of myself, or to try something out, and to cis people it might not be a characteristic or personality that is obviously gendered, but for me it’s inescapably gendered.

    ES: I mean, as a trans person, can you actually imagine a version of yourself without thinking about the gendered implications of it?

    JM: No, exactly.

    *****

    SS: One of the reasons I larp is that sometimes when I’m larping, I can forget that I’m trans, and I crave that so much.

    JM: Do you reflect yourself as cis, or do you just forget that transness is a thing?

    SS: I don’t know. I forget that I am trans. Not that it exists, but the inhabitation of another character can sort of reinscribe a bodily understanding of myself.

    ES: I remember that specifically from Just a Little Lovin’, this physical weirdness of interacting with my own body after the game, like wait, what is this?

    JM: I’m going to take a different direction. Obviously Just a Little Lovin’ was the larp that made my omelet more than cracked my egg, and it was jarring to leave that character body, but not just the body; the way that people behaved around that body. And like, in real life when I walk into a new social situation, especially a non-queer one, I’m always looking for my failure modes and the social and gendered awkwardness have real consequences. But in a larp, people are so ready to paper over your “mistakes.” I experience some of the usual anxiety of performing in the larp, but I have a lot less anxiety about just being in a social situation at all. And I wonder if this is the liberatory element; like, I would like to live in a society where I feel like that all the time.

    ES: To be in a room where you’re guaranteed a kind reading.

    AN: Also something about the fact that everybody has a layer of performance.

    JM: Yeah, and they know it!

    ES: Everyone is aware.

    JM: Because we all do this all the time.

    ES: I feel like we should ask some cis people about whether they have that understanding that they’re performing all the time.

    AN: They don’t!

    SS: Some do, but yeah.

    AN: That’s the problem! But larp is an equalizer in that way, right? That’s why there’s safety in a larp pack and why we party so well at Knutepunkt — even if you’re not trans, everyone has some kind of understanding that reality is a stack and you can play with it, and at the base layer we’re all performing something.

    JM: So larp levels the playing field when it comes to the creation of the self?

    ES: There’s also something about the ensemble thing, though, right? Because we’re not just aware that everyone is performing. There’s this explicit trust and co-performance relationship that’s happening. And you know that everybody kind of knows that.

    AN: Everybody is performing and everybody needs to support everybody else in that performance.

    ES: And if you say that you’re X, of course I’m going to take that at face value, because why wouldn’t I?

    AN: That’s why it’s so hard to lie at larps; we interpret everything so kindly.

    JM: And then in the real world, in the office, people are deeply invested in not doing this.

    *****

    SS: You said something that made me think — about making explicit the gender play in every role. That would do a lot, forcing people to think about it, because the privilege of cisness is that you don’t have to think about gender.

    JM: We often write very gendered characters in the backstory, but we’re not explicit about it.

    AN: And now a lot of larps now have gender-neutral casting —

    JM: Not a fan.

    ES: I hate it!

    AN: Because all this is taken out, right?

    JM: I realize I don’t really play cis characters, but I don’t really play trans characters, either. I’m just kind of this guy —

    ES: I know what you mean.

    JM: And it’s not gender-neutral, but it’s somehow resisting or even escaping the categories. But here’s a conversation: When you larp, is your body your body? Are your scars your scars?

    SS: It’s complicated.

    JM: Yeah, me too. I feel like I have a bit of a Schrödinger’s body.

    SS: I mean, the facts of our bodies are by and large inescapable. We can change them but that’s not really something we do for larp. How we physically access this world is a fact, though we might experience the liminality in that particular larp moment.

    ES: Obviously I acknowledge that I’m playing the character with the same body as I have otherwise, but it would never occur to me to think of any of the specificity of my body as belonging to the character. Almost like something that I have to do to play the character is to step away from the history of the body, because it’s so bound up with identity — and not just identity, but path dependency and time and interaction with gatekeepers and all of this specific body history. For me to play a character it can’t be the same body. It has to be, at the very least, read through a soft focus.

    *****

    JM: Could we ever make a trans liberationist larp that cis people would get?

    ES: What does liberation mean?

    JM: [struggling] … with this sort of idea baked into it that… I have to describe it negatively — no gatekeeping, no violence, no prejudice on the basis of a trans identity.

    ES: That just sounds like freedom from oppression. That feels like a really low bar.

    JM: Yeah, it does. I’m not going to fall into the trap of saying it’s liberation from gender because I like gender and I think it’s a nice flavor. But I could imagine something where fluidity is actually assumed for everyone?

    ES: I don’t want to play that game.

    JM: Okay, not fluidity. But I somehow want the society I would like to see modeled in a larp, though I don’t think it’s so important to model the exact society so much as get something right in the design about the interaction. Why do we interact with gender and each other in a particular way?

    AN: Another answer for a trans liberatory larp would be one that’s for trans people, one that actually leaves the concerns of cis people behind. I don’t know what that looks like  —

    ES: Me neither, but I would play that. Trans utopia sounds nice. I’ve never played a larp that is as queer as my life is.

    Cover photo: Photo by Jasmin Egger on Unsplash.

    This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:

    MacDonald, Jamie. 2022. “Beyond Cracking Eggs.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022 Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 51-54. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.

  • Terror and Warmth

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    Terror and Warmth

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    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.

    several people in 20's clothing posing outside a manor 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.

    Two people on the verge of kissing 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.

    Two people behind a third person with their hands on that person's shoulders 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.

    Two people in corsets, lounging on a couch
    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 person in a white dress with stockings and ballerina slippers holding a cigarette
    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.

    People in a manor house eating food off of a person laying on the table 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.

    Three people in white with pink necklaces lounging on a chair 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.

    A person feeding of another's neck in a room covered in graffiti 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.

    A person holding another person down while another watches on, with a fourth person staring at the camera 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.

    A person in jewels staring at a skull 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.

    A person looking at poetry near the corpse of a person with flowers on them
    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.