Nordic Larp

Tag: Techniques

  • Fake It and Make It

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    Fake It and Make It

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    In this piece, we’ll show you how to cheat when making a costume. Specifically, we’ll look at how you can make an outfit seem historical by identifying a few important visuals elements and using them to communicate a historical period outfit, without needing to actually be historically accurate. Similarly, you can communicate your character’s personality or traits by adding certain items or clothing to their outfit. We will refer to these as communicators.

    Our brains are lazy, and built to take short cuts — we fill in the blanks to save energy. If we have two or three dots, our brains will automatically connect them based on our collective and personal knowledge and fill in the rest. By adding known communicators for an archetype as a “dot”, our co-players will recognize it and add the traits of that archetype themselves. The shared cultural knowledge of the Nordic countries is biased towards Western cultural heritage, and this is also the focus of this piece. However, decomposing a look into archetypes works across cultures, and some archetypes are common in many cultures.

    When you work through these methods, have in mind which cultures your character and co-players are from. Remember that your perception of color and other gendered communicators may also vary from era to era. When a person wears a golden crown, their (at least Western European) co-players know this person is royalty and treat them accordingly. They know this because the crown is, in Western culture, a clear communicator of ”royalty”. By adding communicators to your outfit, for instance
    accessories, props, garments, or colors, which visually communicate traits and characteristics, your costume will speak for you, saying things so you don’t have to. Most people already do this unconsciously when planning a larp outfit. We’d like to help you do this consciously.

    The Five Bullet Method

    The Five Bullet Method is a tool to help you identify the style of clothing you want to achieve. It requires you to have some visual material from the era you want to portray — for example a fashion drawing, a painting, or a photograph. Each bullet in the method is an element — a communicator —and when you combine them you make a style. As we’re talking about costumes (and not historic accuracy) you don’t need to represent every detail to create the impression of an era.

    How to Use the Five Bullet Method

    Some larps provide you with visual material for costume inspirations, but if the one you’re working toward didn’t, head for Google or Pinterest. We suggest you start by searching for a fashion plate, a drawing or painting of a fully clothed figure, as you will get a full body illustration, unlike many paintings. You might search for
    “Fashion plate 1790”.((Other examples of search words you can add: Body: Petite, fat, tall, slim, short, hourglass, triangle, rectangle, inverted triangle. Regency, Biedermeier, Victorian, Edwardian. 1920s Paris, Roaring twenties, Tango. 1930s New York, Film Noir, Femme Fatale. 1940s London, Utility, WW2, post-war.))

    Scroll through the results and get an initial impression of the style, look for any similarities in the fashion plates. When you’ve done this, choose an illustration that appeals to you. Now, go through the five bullets while looking at your chosen reference: What does the silhouette look like —where is the waist placed? How long or short are the different elements? Are there visible layers? What are the colors and patterns on the garment? Are there any accessories accompanying the garment? Keep in mind that some fashion plates can be really unusual — it is fashion after all. To get a better picture, repeat this process with a few more illustrations. Compare and combine and you’ll have a stronger foundation for the next step.

    The Five Bullets

    • Lines: The silhouette and where it’s cut. Examples: long and lean, hourglass, waist placement, sleeve shapes, neckline.
    • Lengths: How long or short. Examples: hemline, sleeves, trousers, vests, differences between day and evening wear.
    • Layers: Both the invisible layers and how the visible layers show the era. Examples: undergarments, overdresses, sheerness, how the fabric falls, vests, jackets, coats.
    • Color and pattern: Color schemes favored in the era. Examples: Bright muted, saturated, pastels, contrasting, color blocking. Examples: Large or small motifs: floral, dots, stripes.
    • Accessories: All the things you wear that are part of the outfit but aren’t the clothes. Examples: hats, gloves, belts, bags, jewelry, canes, shawls, parasols, shoes. Of these items, lines and lengths are the two most important for understanding a look.

    Refining the Style

    Once you know what the palette of the era you’re working in looks like, you can start to figure out how to represent your character. A character has certain characteristics — age, gender, class, occupation, beliefs etc. They also have personality traits, which are, often points on a scale: — young to old, introvert to extrovert, etc. Which characteristics and traits are most important will depend on the character, game, and genre. When you’ve identified the characteristics you think are most important to communicate to other players visually, it’s time to think about what the communicators are for those characteristics and how to transfer them into costume.

    Characteristics

    What do we think about when we see a contemporary young adult in front of us? What colors are they wearing? A working class person or noble — what materials are their clothes made of, linen, wool or silk? What, if any, jewelry are they wearing? Clothing often directly communicates these characteristics. For example, in modern Western culture, we associate light pink dresses and lots of white lace with young women, and our brain will fill in all the other traits we associate with being young and female. When defining what your character should wear, start with the characteristics that will set the frame for who they are.

    Personality traits

    Age, gender, class, beliefOnce you have a frame, look at the details. The table below contains five categories of core personality traits,((The five traits are also known as OCEAN or five-factor model originally drafted by Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal in 1961.)) followed by examples of scalable traits, one at each end of the spectrum. Next to them, you will find suggestions for how to portray this trait with communicators. Remember which country your co-players are from and their cultural background, as these can influence how they interpret the traits and communicators.

    Here’s an example. For a musician character, an obvious communicator is an instrument. This could translate into very different looks, depending on their personality traits. Looking at the extraversion scale, for instance — from energetic to reserved, this could be transferred into costume by the communicator color of the clothes. Bright colors will speak of a happy and energetic court jester, and dark colors will give the impression of a moody and reserved bard. Another example from the conscientiousness scale is the trait “organised”. One way of showing this could be the character’s ink-stained fingers and the paper and quill they bring with them wherever they go. Their garments could be controlled and restricted — high neck, all buttons closed, straight tight sleeves, pressed seams, neat, and in perfect condition.

    Core Personality Trait Example Traits Communicator
    Openness Cautious Clutching a shawl, cardigan or hat. Subdued colors.
    Curious Magnifying glass. Notebook. Untidy hair or clothes.
    Conscientiousness Organised Restricticted. Neat. High neck. Buttons closed. Straight tight sleeves. Pressed seams. Subdued colors with controlled splashes of color.
    Careless Stained, mismatched clothes. Clutching a wine glass. Untidy hair or clothes.
    Extraversion Energetic Loose. Flowy. Bright colors.
    Reserved Controlled clothing or directly opposite to push people away visually. Darker colors. Earthy tones.
    Agreeableness Friendly A flower tucked behind an ear. Light colors.
    Challenging Shiny high boots. A weapon. A suit. Strict combined with in your face. Bold colors.
    Neuroticism Sensitive Grasping a handkerchief. Smelling salt. Clothes that cover you. Shawls and scarves.
    Secure Statement jewelry. A suit or tight fitting clothes. Bold colors.

    The Sourcing Timeline

    When you have made your analysis, you need to source your costume. Luckily, over the past 100- 150 years, fashion has borrowed details from previous eras — so there are shortcuts you can use. Remember, when we’re aiming to make an impression and not a replica, we only need to connect the dots.

    In the illustration, you can see a timeline of fashion history in northwestern Europe. On the left is a rough map of the different eras of fashion and what time interval they cover. On the right are the timeframes that different fiction genres have used as inspiration for their clothing, useful if you’re sourcing a genre costume.

    To use the timeline, find the visual style or time in history you’re going for and look at the links between that period and more modern clothing. Now that you’ve got specific bullet points that you know need to hit for your era and a set of communicators to make sure others will see your character as you want them to be seen, you can head to a thrift store and look for modern clothes that rhyme with the era you’re trying to recreate and which will fit your character.

    For example, if you need a costume relating to the 1910’s, you follow the dotted line to the 1980’s. 80s clothes can have a silhouette similar to the 10s. When you find 80’s pieces in the thrift store, some of them may be close to what you need. Don’t forget that a minor alteration, like where you place the belt, can often shift the silhouette of an outfit putting it in line with your bullet. Adding decorations to a garment can also sometimes help it blend with the era you need it to land in.

    Instead of relying on assumed shared knowledge and being uncertain if what we intended to say with our costume will be read as intended by our co-players, we can now work consciously with style and communicators. This will help us find the character for ourselves and help others understand us, letting us be more confident in our costume choices and our play.

    Sourcing timeline graph

  • Bleed as a Skill

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    Bleed as a Skill

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    Larp takes pride in creating experiences where we as players step out of ourselves and into someone else — our character — and immerse in their existence. A consequence of larping for immersion is bleed, traditionally defined as the separation between you and your character thinning, resulting in aspects of the player and the character bleeding between the two.

    Emphasizing separation between player and character is useful to create alibi for acting differently as your character. However, the separation between character and player is limited by the fact that they share one body. Consequently, if you want to thin the line between yourself and your character to experience more bleed, it’s not hard to do — our brain is bad at separating them to begin with.

    Why would we want to reinforce bleed? Well, why do we larp? To explore things that we might not be able to explore in our everyday life, for liberation, playing around, for personal growth? Either way, taking measures to design our own player experience can make that experience stronger. Designing your player experience includes making conscious choices, instead of reactively dealing with bleed. We all bleed when we larp, but bleed doesn’t have to be just a haphazard consequence. Bleed can also be the product of focused preparations to tailor the experience you want to have, and a tool to enhance your own immersion. We advocate proactive, rather than reactive
    (or even retroactive) bleed management.

    This toolbox provides practical tips on how to manipulate your brain into more bleed and more immersive experiences. You might see this as a guide for what to avoid if you hate bleed, but that’s not why we wrote it.

    But how does it work?

    Self-manipulation is a conscious, top-down process, where you use your cognitive, self-aware thought processes (top) to rewire brain connectivity and inform your subconscious patterns of action and reaction (bottom) — see the highly explanatory figure.

    A great example of this process is cognitive therapy, where the goal is to consciously rewire harmful subconscious reactions. For instance, a person suffering from a phobia can expose themselves on purpose to situations they normally avoid. The situation triggers the unwanted alarm systems (the anxiety). They then practice behaving differently in that situation, rewiring the alarm systems to stop firing. Their conscious change of behavior alters subconscious reactions (see Craske & Mystkowski, 2006). It’s also possible to create an alarm by doing the opposite, which of course has nothing to do with therapy (but maybe larping).

    Image source: Rawpixel.com

    Here are two areas of character preparation where you can use your newfound knowledge about the brain’s potential for conscious self-manipulation: the bleed-oriented character builder, and the bleed-enhancing relation-building process.

    The Bleed-Oriented Character Builder

    When creating a character for a larp, we want to build a real, breathing person, someone that acts and reacts to their internal and external world, with a living personality. But how do you create a new, yet believable and real, personality for a character in a limited amount of time? And how do you then become that person?

    Tool #1: Creating a Skewed Narrative Identity

    Narrative identity is a concept within personality psychology that describes the process of taking your experiences and integrating them into an ever-evolving story with yourself as the protagonist. This story creates structure, meaning and purpose in an otherwise chaotic existence.

    Creating a narrative identity for your character can be used to enhance the feeling of being that character. To understand why, you only need to know one thing: a person’s particular way of narrating their reality is a powerful predictor of well-being. The way you tell the story of your life, what you emphasize, the words you use, predicts and potentially affects how you do long-term (see Adler et al. 2016). Choose your words wisely — they have power.

    Here are three simple lessons from narrative identity you can use in character creation:

    1. Agency: How much control over life events does your character feel they have? Are they a passive agent that things happen to, with no sense of control? Or are they an active agent that controls life events and decides how to react to them?
    2. Connectivity: To what extent does your character feel connected to other people, as opposed to isolated and alone?
    3. Purpose: How good is your character at ascribing meaning to events — especially negative events?

    A character with a strong narrative sense of self will feel more real, both to yourself, and to others. It provides a coherent way to relate to your surroundings, which informs the choices you make while playing. For more impactful play, consider pushing your character’s agency, connectivity and purpose to extreme positives or negatives. If you are playing a happy character with a good outlook on life, talk about yourself as someone who makes things happen, who turns to friends when facing adversity, and make sure to designate long-term positive meaning to things that happen to you. Do the opposite if you are playing a sad, depressed, or helpless character. Describe yourself as a passive participant in life, and tell yourself that you face obstacles alone or as collateral damage. Emphasize negative life events as meaningless, without any silver linings.

    Bonus bleed: Want to be really sad? Place the blame for anything that goes wrong on yourself. Not only will this make sure that other people see you as a failure, it will also subconsciously make you believe that you are indeed a failure. Going through the motions makes them feel real.

    Tool #2: Exploiting the Faulty Shortcuts of Your Brain

    Cognitive biases are mistakes in processes such as reasoning, evaluating, and remembering. They result from shortcuts your brain takes, like “jumping to conclusions”, in order to save time and energy.

    Humans do this all the time. If you think you don’t, you’re suffering from the Bias-Bias: the tendency to see yourself as less biased than other people.

    Most people consider these biases a pain, but we’d like to turn that around. In larp preparations, biases give us something to work with instead of against, and help us save time and resources building our character. And what do we not have a lot of before going to a larp? Time and resources! Because cognitive biases are an integrated part of human behavior, they form believable character portraits. They can also help you think on your feet and make decisions that feel natural for your character, resulting in more immersion.

    The best thing about cognitive biases is that they reinforce themselves. In other words, by using them, you push your subconscious self toward whatever state of mind the bias is serving.

    The Bleed-Enhancing Relation-Building Process

    You can do a lot to influence how you see yourself as a character, but your relationships to others are just as important in the social setting of a larp.

    When tricking the brain, work with clear-cut opposites. Nuance makes it harder for the brain to understand what it is supposed to do, as too much depends on circumstance. We will concentrate on the two most basic human forms of relations: attraction and repulsion.

    Tool #3: Cognitive Biases for Attraction and Repulsion

    Our brain makes plenty of automatic shortcuts when relating to other people:

    1. We think better of people we already like
    2. The more time we spend with someone, the more we like (or at least tolerate) them
    3. We see other groups as more homogenous, uninteresting, and less adaptive than our own
    4. We hold entire groups other than our own responsible for the actions of a single group member, while dividing negative responsibility individually within our own group

    This can be exploited in your larp preparation when creating your character’s inner circle. If you don’t know the people you will play closely with, spend time with them before the larp starts. With limited time (for instance two hours before the larp starts), prioritise doing something where there’s a lot of pressure and uncertainty. Humans seek each other when exposed to stress! Fall from somewhere high and trust that the group will catch you, or go swimming in the dark after watching a shark movie.

    Bonus bleed: Add any number of optional elements to the activities that further increase adrenaline levels, like putting on a blindfold, being naked, telling each other scary stories in the dark, or teaming up with someone random to jump out from the woods. The last one has an extra bonus — having a common enemy strengthens in-group bonding!

    Tool #4: Bodily Strategies for Attraction and Repulsion

    Remember that thing you ate once that made you sick, that you were never able to eat again? Or Pavlov’s famous experiment where he used a bell to prime dogs to expect feeding, where they eventually salivated just from the sound of the bell? Same thing. Physical memory is powerful.

    Conditioning is the process of associating one thing with another thing by repeated consecutive exposure, creating a reflex response. Bell means food means saliva. Why not do the same for larp relations? Try looking at a picture of your character’s enemy whenever you’re stressed or dealing with something unpleasant — like when you are hangry or hungover.

    Bonus bleed: If you really want to exploit the mysteries of your body to create a deeper experience, why not use all the tools, including the hormonal fluctuations of your menstrual cycle?

    Self-reported observations from groups of women show that the week before menstruation comes with higher physical stress and less interest in erotic subjects. The mid-cycle, especially between menstruation and ovulation, triggers more positive affiliations towards others, higher interest in erotic subjects, greater well-being, better mood, and general awesomeness. This might affect male co-players as well — men seem to like women a lot when they are ovulating. Why not let this influence the timing of when you meet other players, if logistics cooperate?

    Tool #5: Engage All Your Senses

    Smell your co-players. Humans favor the scent of people who are genetically different from ourselves (thank you, evolution and reproduction). If you play close relationships with players whose smell you prefer, your brain will help you like them more. If you want your character to repulse other players, surround yourself in smells that our brains are wired to react negatively to, like rotten or spoiled food (thanks again, evolution). There are less intrusive versions of this, like opening a can of surströmming (fermented baltic herring) or eating lots of garlic (with obvious extra benefits if you’re playing a human at a vampire larp).

    Touch your co-players. If you want to feel good during a larp and to create that feeling together with someone else, touch them. Holding hands, hugging, or just touching someone’s arm or shoulder will suffice. If you’re a designer and want to create a feeling of alienation and distrust, ban all touching. People will be sad.

    Tool #6: Fast Tracking Emotional Bonding

    Feeling physically close to someone is a powerful part of feeling attraction. But if you’re looking to get to the romantic side of things, you’ll want to feel emotionally close too. A feeling of shared knowledge plays a huge part in emotional closeness. We suggest using the 36 questions from the study on generating interpersonal closeness (see Aron et al. 1997), as these are questions that have been shown to create a common sense of intimacy and closeness.

    Bonus: Overall Bleed-Enhancing Strategies!

    If you have time to work with (not unlikely, given the trend of larp sign-ups a year in advance), start using these strategies in advance. Giving yourself practice time provides your brain with more time to realise that “ok, this is what my life looks like now,” making it even harder for your brain to separate between who you are, and who your character is.

    There is also one simple, available strategy for enhancing all physical and cognitive experiences: Sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation efficiently reduces cognitive inhibition — it makes you more impulsive. It also strips away your brain’s ability to filter input from your surroundings: everything matters, everything is important. This is great for emotional chaos, and for larping intense, Nordic scenarios.

    Where to Go From Here?

    The world we experience comes from the inside out, not just the outside in. The way we think and act affects how we feel, in life and in larp. Some level of bleed is unavoidable — it is our choice whether we want to be passive bleed recipients or treat it like a skill that can be trained. By changing our behavior consciously, we can experience almost anything we’d like — and confuse the brain into even more bleed. Is it a good idea? Maybe. We’ll leave that up to you.

    Bibliography

    Michelle G. Craske & Jayson L. Mystkowski (2006): Exposure therapy and extinction: Clinical studies. In M. G. Craske, D. Hermans, & D. Vansteenwegen (eds.), Fear and learning: From basic processes to clinical implications. American Psychological Association.

    Jonathan M. Adler, Jennifer Lodi-Smith, Frederick L. Philippe & Iliane Houle (2016): The Incremental Validity of Narrative Identity in Predicting Well-Being. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(2).

    Arthur Aron, Edward Melinat, Elaine N. Aron, Robert Darrin Vallone & Renee J. Bator (1997): The experimental generation of interpersonal closeness: A procedure and some preliminary findings. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(4).

    Tova Gerge & Gabriel Widing (2006): In T. Fritzon, & T. Wrigstad (eds.), Role, Play, Art.

    Can’t be bothered to Google cognitive biases? Look no further! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

    Author note: Additional technical citations are available, but have been omitted for space.

  • Preparing for a Larp

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    Preparing for a Larp

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    Multi-day larps inevitably require a great deal of commitment in time, money and effort. A few hours’ preparation, in good time, can make a huge difference to your experience at the event.

    Here are some broad suggestions on how you can prepare for a larp.

    Read the Material, Settings and Character Sheet

    Read your character sheet, the design document, the casting lists, and other documents sent by the organisers. Make notes and calendar reminders of key deadlines such as payment and responses to casting questionnaires. This keeps track of everything but also helps the game organisers, who do not need to chase you. Join any Facebook group the organisers recommend and watch for announcements.

    If the larp provides long and detailed pre-written characters, they can be difficult to remember. Write down some notes in an in-character notebook you can use in game. This is a better alternative to refer to in game than a non-diegetic character sheet.

    Finally, some players like to read or watch movies about the setting or relevant subject, for example in a historical game or in a game about a real life situation. The knowledge or emotions from those sources can be brought into the game naturally, through the lens of your character, if appropriate.

    Practical Preparations

    Book travel and accommodation. Doing this early can save you money. Make sure you have the relevant visas, travel insurance and anything else you would need to travel to the relevant country for the larp. Check in advance any travel from the station or airport to the venue. Sometimes the organisers will provide a coach — be sure to sign up to this in time. If not, reach out of the Facebook group to carpool. Bring comfort snacks, any personal medicines, a hot water bottle, anything that you need to be physically comfortable.

    Make Pre-game Connections

    If the game relies on you making connections, then engage with the relevant Facebook groups pre-game. First, reach out to the players of specific characters mentioned on your character sheet. Four or five connections are more than enough to get you started. Think of two axes: positive to negative and static vs. dynamic. A static relationship is something that may evolve but is relatively settled. A dynamic relationship is one that is expected to change dramatically during the game. For example, a positive static friendship is a long-lasting friendship. These elements are fluid and can change unexpectedly in game time, but these axes provide a good starting point.

    If you are worried you may not have enough relationships but at the same time do not want to stretch yourself too thin and overpromise, you can also make some simple connections for example: we are friends because I help them with their homework. If the two players have chemistry, it can become something more, but if there is not much time or inclination, it can stay as a casual connection.

    Some players love to pre-play scenes by play by text or over Facebook. Other players like to write stories about their backgrounds and events that have happened in the past. These can all be useful in finding the emotional connection to the character. However, they can also be quite time-consuming, so it is possible that not every player will be able to engage in this way.

    “Finding” the Character

    Think of the personality and emotional state of your character. Choose a signature song, archetype or story arc. Consider how the character would react to a certain situation, their belief system, and feelings.

    Work on the physicality of your character, their posture, accent, any mannerisms that are distinct from yours. Adopting a few characteristics for your character that are distinct from you as a player can be very interesting and effective in portraying different personas.

    Costuming and Props

    With costuming, start with the advice given by the designers. It’s easier and less stressful to buy, rent, or create your costumes in advance. Don’t underestimate the power of your friendly fellow larpers — they’ll often be able to provide obscure items, or point you at a place you can get them. Make a costume list which will also help with packing.

    Prepare any props. Gather some keepsakes or tools of the trade that identify your character and ground you emotionally. Letters, photographs of your loved ones, a locket, or a wedding ring can all be very emotive props both for you and for others who interact with your character’s personal story.

    Pre-Party

    If you arrive the night before, perhaps participate in a dinner or drinks with other players. It is always nice to get to meet people out of character and it helps with the pre-game nerves.

    Don’t Overdo It

    There is such a thing as too much preparation. If you have invested too much time in preparation and preplay you may not meet the expectations that you yourself have placed on the game. Similarly, a game has a finite amount of time and overcommitting to plots and connections may leave you stretched.

    Have Fun!

    Preparing for a larp can be great fun, especially if you do it in good time. It can help get you in the mood, extend the enjoyment of the larp and prepare you for a great experience!

  • Playing With Sexual Arousal

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    Playing With Sexual Arousal

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    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:

    1. How would you like to touch me? (take)
    2. 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.
    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.

    Arousal enhanced by the alibi of characters and fiction

    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.

    Anneli Friedner (2019): Brave space — Some Thoughts on Safety in Larps. Nordiclarp.org. https://nordiclarp.org/2019/10/07/the-brave-space-some-thoughts-on-safety-in-larps/. Ref Feb 29, 2020.

    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

    Betty Martin (2016): Wheel of Consent: The Three Minute Game. https://bettymartin.org/download-wheel/. Ref Feb 29, 2020.

    Midori (2017): Forte Femme Workshop. https://www.facebook.com/PlanetMidori. Ref Feb 29, 2020.

    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.

  • Playing a Leader

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    Playing a Leader

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    Being cast in a leadership role is a great opportunity, but it can mean extra responsibility to shape the tone and experience of your play group, both ingame and offgame. As a player, your goal should be to empower everyone to focus on playing their characters and having a great larp. Whether you’re playing a school prefect, a bunker president, or a marine officer, leadership characters are often focal points for ingame information and tasks, and many of the core principles of playing them well remain consistent.

    There are many strategies you can use to bring your fellow players together and to create an atmosphere of trust. Let’s look at a few of them:

    Before the Larp

    Understand what is required of you as a leader — and also what isn’t — both in setup and during runtime. This will help you set your level of engagement, and recognize when you risk being overloaded — and either delegate responsibilities, or change your character if necessary.

    If the larp has pre-game online discussions, be active in the build-up to the larp if you can. You don’t need to be omnipresent, but being visible in discussions, dropping tidbits about how you plan to play your character, and posting from an account that uses a recognisable photo of you can create familiarity and trust.

    Take an interest in players who will be playing your subordinates. What do they think your character should know about theirs? What play do they want from the group and from you? What are their boundaries? Answering those questions yourself first can help hesitant players give more useful answers, and demonstrates sincerity in sharing vulnerabilities to help each other play safely.

    Expect your play to revolve around your group. When setting up relations, focus on connections within your group that emphasise or undercut your character as a leader, and establish your character’s investment in the success of the group and the people in it. Choose relations outside the group that complement the interactions you want within it, so they provide variety and play opportunities rather than making you inaccessible.

    Build your group’s lore and dynamics with your fellow players. Establish shared expectations, like how successful the group is at what it’s supposed to do, or whether the characters are fiercely loyal, cheerfully indifferent, or at each other’s throats. Define known internal and external-facing views and behaviours of your group, and as a leader, embody these views and behaviour. Encourage your group to play off you and your position (even when you’re not present) by either following and strengthening it or going against it — for example, if you establish yourself as a strict by-the-book boss, both followers and rebels can use you to give additional ingame depth to their play.

    Try to make your costume recognisable and describable so others can find you in a crowd or ask around for you. Make sure it includes some way to tell the time!

    During Workshops

    Find a moment to gather your group and bring anyone who wasn’t involved in preplay up to speed. Collectively review the decisions you made before the game and see if they still make sense in person, and are acceptable to players who couldn’t be involved.

    Have everyone introduce themselves and describe what they want from this experience, and what they’d like the group to play up about their character.

    Ask players if there are any group responsibilities they want to avoid or play on so you know who to delegate which tasks to. Encourage people to come to you in play if they feel their larp would be improved by more involvement in official group tasks.

    Check if anyone has any access needs the group can help accommodate to level the playing field and make the group feel safe. If you know the larp’s structure, consider planning times to bring your group together in play, but avoid making these meetups mandatory unless the design requires it.

    Work together to ensure other players understand your group and how they can engage with you during the larp.

    During Play

    Be a hub of activity for your group but avoid micromanagement, which can both prove stressful for you and deny others opportunities to participate. Give others a chance to contribute — they can be tasked to find ball dates, research the macguffin, plan an attack, or serve as a liaison officer to other groups. The leader gets to sign off on the action — responsibility lies with them — but by spreading the work both prevents overburdening individuals and gives all players opportunities for high status play. It also creates more potential for drama.

    Your leadership position gives you access to information. Share it with your group as much as possible; share too much rather than too little unless someone specifically asked for play around being uninformed.

    Involve your group in decision making — ask for and listen to their opinions. If the ingame culture supports it, consider explicit mechanisms like voting, too. Remember, if they suggest bad ideas it may signal that they’re interested in playing on the consequences.

    Play an enthusiastic, larger-than-life version of your character at the start of the larp to give your group a beacon to align around. Use your depiction to illustrate key elements of the character’s role, personality, and how to interact with them.

    Project when you speak. Speak louder and slower than normal and pay attention to facing the group you’re talking to.

    Use non-verbal play. Take up space! Stand in the middle of the room and don’t back off when someone plays aggressive. Have a straight back, don’t lean against walls, and spread your legs to shoulder-width instead of crossing them. Stand rather still and move calmly. Look straight forward rather than down, and look people in the eye when you talk to them. Gesture with your wrists stiff rather than loose. If you’ve calibrated with other players and you want to convey superiority or dominance, you might even step this up with things like staying seated while people have to stand and report to you, or interrupt and cutting them off when they talk.

    Understand your offgame advantages and use them to enhance your presence, but not to be overbearing. If you’re tall, use your height to centre focus when you need it, but make sure you aren’t looming over anyone who’s uncomfortable. If you’re playing in your native language and others aren’t, try giving an inspirational speech, but be mindful of anyone who might not be able to answer back fluently. Calibrate this with your co-players before and during play.

    Not all leaders are willing and you can play on reticence, delegating decisions, but at a dramatic moment making a forceful and determined stance.

    Not all leaders are competent or sensible. If you go this route, it’s important to negotiate offgame and make sure your co-players will understand what you’re doing. That said, by giving people the wrong tasks to do you can create even more drama: the shy student as master of ceremonies, the blunt soldier forced to be a diplomat, the skilled surgeon required to deal with coughs and colds. Things going wrong or deadlines being missed can create interpersonal play.

    Don’t force players into tasks they’re uncomfortable with or are unable to complete. In larps, we mostly want to play on character drama and the experience of being competent. Make sure that players are set up to succeed when they want to perform competence, and that players who want to show incompetence can communicate this clearly in play. Remember to delegate tasks that need competence to players with the skills required, and pair up other players who want to try out those experiences with them as mentors. The characters may be seasoned marines, but the players probably aren’t.

    Avoid “make-work” with no dramatic value. It bores players and can undermine the sense of importance of assigned tasks. Having someone cook for three hours or fill paperwork that would be necessary in real life but doesn’t play into plot or drama may be practical, but rarely makes for fun play.

    Match play to players and ensure they’re prepared for the culture of the organization they’re supposed to play. If you adopt a rigid military structure and leadership style, players with little actual experience of it may not react as expected, and you’ll need to make allowances.

    Create memorable moments. Leaders are often busy during larps and the temptation is to limit play to your immediate circle. However, interaction with a leader can add a lot to the immersion and atmosphere for the player of a subordinate. Try to have at least one meaningful, personal interaction with every subordinate — seek a subordinate’s personal advice, pat the rookie on the shoulder for an accomplishment and say how proud you are, have a clash with the maverick of the group. If you’re leading too many characters to make this possible, enlist peers and your direct subordinates to spread the load, but still try to reach out when you can.

    Play up those around you and share the spotlight. Remember to use the information you gathered before the game to make sure you give players the kind of interaction they need to support their portrayal. For example, always ask for the opinion of an “expert” before making a related decision or reprimand the person playing the lazy worker. You have a lot of influence on how these players’ larps may turn out.

    After the game

    Prepare to be active in post-game support and care. As a prominent figure in many players’ larps, it’s likely your character will be a focus of discussions and feedback afterwards. This can be emotionally taxing if it’s negative, but highly rewarding when it’s positive. Remember to keep sharing the spotlight and reflecting it back to the people you played with — you’re peers again now. The amount of feedback will vary wildly; after some larps you may get none, and after others an overwhelming amount. The more prominent and dramatic the role, the more you’re likely to hear from other players. You may be called upon to support your co-players, but make sure you’re looking after your own needs and welfare too, either with co-players or with the safety team.

  • Magic Items

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    Magic Items

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    Magic items are (often small everyday) items used by the player to help them animate a character during play and to evoke the character afterwards. Through this article we want to help players understand the power a magic item can have during gameplay, and how to choose and prepare a magic item for their character, as well as how to distinguish everyday use from in-character use. Note that when we talk here of “magic items”, we mean a technique for using a prop in any genre of larp, not an in-character magic item in a fantasy larp.

    We will also touch upon the possibilities for using a magic item during or after debriefing either to consciously distance themselves from their character or to invoke in-game feelings after the larp is over.

    Choosing and Preparing Your Item

    Most larps use props and costumes to some extent, but magic items are ones you as a player choose to imbue with special significance and connection to your character. The best choice is usually a personally distinct item that you can carry with you while playing, so you can access it as needed. It could be part of the costume, a tool, or a personal memento. What really matters is that you can find a way to make it a symbolic part of the character’s history or everyday life: a particular piece of jewelry, a letter from a loved one, or a sonic screwdriver would all be good choices.

    Sometimes it happens naturally, during play, that an otherwise insignificant prop becomes magical through repeated interactions, but you can also consciously make one as preparation for the larp. It works well in concert with finding the costume and physical mannerisms for the character. When you try out costumes, a certain accessory might really nail the character as you see it or a prop lets you do a certain thing that is perfect for what you want to express. When you start feeling the bond between item and character, include the item in various preparations for your character. Wear the item when trying out body language, hold it when pondering the dilemmas the character will be facing, or just daydreaming your way into the role. You’ll soon find the object beginning to be inextricably intertwined with the character.

    Using Your Item During Play

    The magic in the item can be used in several ways during play. It always functions as a passive reminder of your character that can help you maintain immersion. It works wonderfully as a catalyst to push you deeper into your character when you’re having a hard time immersing.

    It is also a great tool to give physical expression to the inner life of your character. Playing with your wedding ring when you have marriage trouble or scrunching up your hat when nervous can be great examples of communicating your feelings while focused on your inner life. It doesn’t even have to be a specific situation, a magic item could be the thing your character always takes out when there’s nothing going on. Re-reading the letter, winding up the pocket watch, or whittling with the pocket knife can make beautiful in-character moments when nothing else is going on.

    After the Larp

    Putting down or taking off a magic item can be an excellent way to sharpen the divide between being in your character and returning to yourself. If the item is always with the character, then not having it makes it easier to be yourself instead.

    When you are completely done playing the character, the magic item can serve as the focus of a ritual to leave the character behind. Depending on your relationship to the character, this can be a more or less destructive endeavour. Destroying the item that symbolizes the character can ward off some negative bleed effects, while other characters need a more tender approach in order to lay them to rest.

    If instead, you want to retain the connection to the character, a magical item can serve as a reminder of how it felt to be that person, long after playing the larp. Us humans have an uncanny ability to recall feelings, given the right sensory input. That can be tapped into and used to bring back a character for a new larp or a nostalgic moment, or possibly to evoke positive traits from the character, useful for specific situations, e.g. courage to handle an everyday conflict or confidence to meet a new person on a date.

    Building a character, bringing the persona to life, and taking control of any emotional residue isn’t necessarily hard, but with a tool as a magic item, it can be easier to keep a mindful process.

  • Listening for Negotiation

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    Listening for Negotiation

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    Listening connects players and creates shared spaces. Listening is crucial for diving into stories, moods and fictional worlds. Listening is a key skill in larp, but are we aware of that? How good are we at listening? Can we learn it and improve it?

    In larps we usually give importance to speech abilities and visuals, but listening can shape the rhythm and space of a live experience. We will present an interdisciplinary approach drawing from music and sound studies theory: we will also propose exercises and practical solutions. Listening is a matter of respect and empathy. It is an interface for co-creation: if we all learn how to use it, maybe we will achieve new forms of negotiation.

    Listening as an Embodied Tool

    Your listening is unique: no one listens like you. Your listening is linked to your body and your experiences. It is individual and unique, like your fingerprint or your voice. Since listening is not tangible, this aspect is often forgotten. However, it is important to keep this in mind as you read the rest of this text. Each technique and exercise will test your way of listening in a different way and produce different outcomes. These are

    not prescriptive exercises. Some will be very useful, others will not. You may already use some of these techniques. Everyone larps in different ways, everyone learns according to their own rhythm and their own interest. Each listener, each soul, is different and beautiful.

    Listening — A Different Awareness

    Listening is physical, like having blond hair or dark eyes. Understanding this, we can learn to use it as a tool to portray a character. Just as we change our appearance, our posture, or our way of speaking, we can try to change the way we listen. This does not require previous training, but it is necessary to be more aware, or perhaps aware in a different way toward what surrounds us. We propose two pre-larp exercises and three techniques for in-game use.

    Exercises

    1. Listen to the Space

    If possible, visit the location before the larp. Walk in silence and listen to it. Every room has its own voice. Figure out what spot your character will like the best, where they will spend most of their time. Connect your character to the location by deep listening to it. Experience that with fresh ears. Then try to break down the soundscapes. Use your mind like an audio mixer, breaking down what you hear, as a producer isolates sounds and instruments when working on a song. This place will be your house. Know its inner voice.

    2. Listen to the Time

    Prepare yourself by listening to the sound of the setting. Will it be historical? Listen to the era’s music and songs. Become familiar with the historical soundscape and what was around back then. Usually this is only done when our character is somehow connected to the music (musician, singer, etc.), but remember that we are all music lovers. We all have songs we are attached to and that speak to us. Let your characters have some too. The same applies also to dystopian/non-realistic settings: every world has it own sounds. Listen to soundtracks of movies or games that are set in the same or similar world. Use this music while reading or preparing your character. Listen to it again just before the game, to better get into your character’s shoes and start your larp with a boost of immersion.

    Techniques

    1. Shape your own Soundscape

    Each character has their own soundscape. You can build it as you would any physical affectation. Do they live in a silent world? A noisy one? If you have your own house or private space in the game, make it sound like your character. For example, if you are a priest, surround yourself with silence. Let your environment speak for you.

    2. Filters and Listening Positions

    Listening can be an instrument of power. You can use it to exclude other people or silence them, or conversely to rebel or impose yourself. When we listen we always use filters, which can come from our cultures, privileges, beliefs, expectations, intentions. Each of these values filters the attention we pay when we talk to someone. In a larp these filters can be reworked and combined in many ways. Not listening to someone or to certain sounds is a powerful way of building relationships. Changing those filters generates new listening positions, the attitudes that place us, through sound, in the world and the social order.

    If you play a mystical character maybe you may never listen to all that is said by ordinary people. Or your traumatized character can react strongly to sounds connected to their trauma.

    3. Limit Verbocentrism

    In the most larps, we talk a lot. Words are used to express concepts and feelings and to achieve goals. Try to listen more and talk a little less. What are the other players expressing, or asking for? How are they right now? Listening in this way becomes a vehicle for inclusion and hopefully a contribution to an ingame safe space.

    Conclusions

    These techniques are not universal and they only work in the right context. It may not be easy, since it’s based on an impalpable material and because listening can take place only when there is connection and mutual understanding. It works if we mean listening, and larp, as a way of being connected to the world.

  • Inner Tension

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    Inner Tension

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    So, you’ve been given a predesigned character that you’re going to be playing in a larp. You read the character sheet. “Yes,” you think to yourself , “this sounds kind of like a person. I can see where they fit into the larp setting and the designer’s overall scheme. I can see how they are intended to behave and present themselves.” But! Maybe it feels a bit thin and schematic? Maybe the designer has thought hard about how this character contributes to the larp, but hasn’t had time to think quite so hard about what it will be like to actually play them for a weekend? Maybe they are lacking in the sort of interest that turns a character from a space-filler into someone memorable?

    This is where inner tension comes in. Think of the character sheet, as presented to you, as showing the outer layer of the character — how they appear to the rest of the world, how they engage with the larp environment by default. But then within that, there will be another person — or maybe more than one — which may inform behaviour, decisions, actions, etc. in a way that’s not obvious and predictable from looking at the outward nature of the character. And maybe there will be interesting tensions between the outer persona and the inner person, that will generate play for yourself and for your co-players.

    This technique is a shortcut. You may be happier with a detailed psychological exploration of your character to unfold its inner workings in depth. But not everyone works that way; and sometimes even if you do, you might end up in similar places.

    What is Inner Tension?

    Let’s take an example from the most familiar generic fantasy setting: your character is a tavernkeeper. This is an easy stereotype to play: the tropes of a tavernkeeper include bonhomie, tolerance up to a point, the capability of violence, and so on. But what will make your tavernkeeper different from any other? Perhaps, back when they were a kid, they really wanted to be a paladin when they grew up. And perhaps that ‘inner paladin’ is still present. This will affect things like how they deal with bad behaviour in the tavern. It may mean that they address some clients with more respect than others. It may mean that they don’t cooperate with the local thieves’ guild — or perhaps they do, as part of a plan to expose them? Perhaps they have a set of rules, rituals, and dogmas that they adhere to, to the annoyance or amusement of their regulars.

    This is a process of analysis, rather than exploration — which means it can be used on short notice. When someone in the tavern starts reminiscing about their time on crusade, you as a player immediately know how to respond — you’d love to go on a crusade, if it wasn’t for the responsibility of this tavern — and people will see how the tavernkeeper’s eyes will light up.

    If you have a more ‘method’ approach to characterization, the same technique can still work. Robert de Niro famously said (Levy 2014) that, when preparing to play the character of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, he thought of the drivers as hermit crabs, each scuttling around the city in their own shell. Perhaps your tavernkeeper’s internal identity might be a hermit crab? They’ve decorated and pimped the tavern to express their personality. Within it, they feel safe — armoured, at home, and confident. Outside the tavern, they might feel naked — exposed. They might stick to walls and corners, and be nervous about being approached closely. Hermit crabs are always on the lookout for bigger shells, so that they can grow — is the tavernkeeper keen to expand, asking for word of larger properties that might be coming vacant? Maybe they are grabby, and when they take money, they unconsciously shape their fingers into claws?

    Added Depth

    When asked to make an unexpected decision or choice, players tend to react in a rather binary way — “What do you want to drink?” will often be met with, either the obvious thing or the same thing that the player themselves would drink, or else the opposite. But thinking about the hermit crab: perhaps when in their own tavern, they drink like a monarch, the best wine in the house. But when elsewhere, perhaps they are too wary to drink anything but water — or anything at all.

    A character can have multiple inner tensions. Another approach is to use a composite of people who you know in real life. Perhaps, instead of a paladin or a hermit crab, the way the tavernkeeper presents themselves physically is driven by Person A inside; perhaps the way they behave socially is driven by Person B; etc. So, perhaps the friend from whom you have drawn Person A gets up early in the morning, so as to fit in a lengthy preparation routine. How will that feel for the character, when you do it at the larp? Why do they feel the need to do this? How does it interact with the other aspects of their life as a tavernkeeper? Not having these answers given to you in a prescriptive way, in a deep character description or in a shallow one that you have made deep yourself by exploring it, can be liberating. Real people don’t always have rational explorations for how they do things, and don’t always have answers to questions — a lot of the time, they just act out of habit or instinct. A character who is too strongly guided by purpose or whose reactions have been fully reasoned out often won’t feel as real.

    Tension within the character is what produces interesting play — for you, and for those around you. Thinking about internal identities can be a way to quickly and easily generate internal tension. It can enable you to respond realistically to unexpected situations and to ensure that your characters are memorably different from one another, different from other similar characters, and different from yourself.

  • How to Play an Erotic Larp

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    How to Play an Erotic Larp

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    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.
  • Fear on the Starting Line

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    Fear on the Starting Line

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    At the start of runtime, I’m completely overcome with feelings of fear and anxiety. I do not feel comfortable in my own skin. I believe that I am not capable of embodying the character to satisfaction. I believe that I will let down others who will be depending on me to support their experiences.

    The first step is the hardest. The first choice to speak to another participant in play is not a proud moment. I don’t project my voice when I am nervous, and many times the unlucky participant has had to ask me to repeat what I just said. My body is defaulting to the nervous version of me. I don’t know what to do with my hands.

    Sometimes I am still working my way up to making that first step, and a participant initiates conversation. I am not ready. When I speak to this person, my words are safe and non-committal. It would not surprise me if they feel that I’m either rudely disengaging with them, ineptly playing, or just merely being too boring.

    This feeling of fear has followed me throughout my larp experience over the last 25 years.

    These thoughts and feelings are entirely normal. They are difficult but manageable. We can overcome them. It’s going to be okay.

    Fail Quickly and Forget It Happened

    I am aware that my fear and anxiety is out of proportion. I am aware that once I begin play during runtime, these negative feelings will recede. I liken this to a stumbling start, but at least one that has some forward motion, enough to build personal momentum towards a desired level of confidence. After all, the start is always just a little awkward for everyone. If I screw up, it’s very likely no one will remember, and if they do remember, no one will likely care. This rush to start can use the fear in a helpful way too by transition from afraid-to-start to afraid-to-stop.

    Make Choices that are Comfortable and Safe

    If I have agency over my role, I can put the play within my comfort zone. What’s good is that this is a very acceptable way to share a larp experience with strangers, or a new-to-me style, or a different culture. The play in a larp that’s safe is not satisfying though and always going for safe play is boring for both me and for others who are looking for exciting play. Safe play is steady ground to which we can take the next step though. We can use it to challenge ourselves, a solid launch toward play with bigger risks.

    Liquid Courage

    While intoxication does not lead to mindful play, a single alcoholic beverage serving helps in multiple aspects. On the science and biology end, when the alcohol hits my forebrain, colloquially referred to as the worry wart, the brain activity related to my nerves and anxiety is anaesthetized, specifically my ability to inhibit my own behavior. The voice inside us that’s telling us that we can’t succeed becomes a little quieter. The visual cue of a drink in hand invites other players to have one with me.

    Late Start to Let Others Take the Lead

    Since others also struggle with the less-than-perfect play at the start of runtime, either plan to come late or engage in a distinctly solitary activity if early. When other players have left the initial awkward stage, join play with them. By doing this we are letting their play draw us in, which helps us get past the awkward stage quickly, and it also affirms their choices by showing support.

    Interrogate the Fear

    The fear and anxiety I feel is the outcome of the thoughts that I am thinking. By means of internal conversation, examining these thoughts significantly allows me to get that fear down to manageable levels. So what am I afraid of?

    • I am afraid that no one will like me.
    • I am afraid that I will harm someone’s experience and no one will want to play with me.
    • I am afraid that I am not interesting/
      attractive/strong/trustworthy enough for the players I engage with and they will want to have their experience with someone else.

    Upon examination, is there actually a danger of appearing uncool enough that people will dislike us? A very small possibility at most. Uncool is temporary until we do something cool.

    While it’s important to steer with care for the experience of others in mind, is there really a risk that we’ll accidentally ruin someone’s experience? Under a good design, that risk is quite small. If the design is weak in this regard, the best we can do is the best we can do. Worrying doesn’t help so just move forward with things that we can do. Being mindful of others does lead to more good experiences for us.

    The fear that we’re not good enough in the various categories is not easily dismissed. It is true that we cannot be everyone’s first pick for every interaction, but we don’t have to be to merely start. Even among strangers, a single conversation can lead to beautiful play. Let things go, allow for possibilities. We can be good choices for others, and don’t have to worry about being a first choice.

    Fear is normal. While we cannot eliminate it, we can help each other overcome it. We can become practiced at using those tools that help us get through that awkward stage to where we can engage in play with confidence.