Nordic Larp Talks

Tag: community

  • Larp in  Wartime: Palestine – Tammy Nassar

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    In 2024, the Palestian larp organisation Bait Byout ran its Larp Factory training programme in social impact larp design and game design for 43 young adults aged 18-30 from the West Bank and Jerusalem. In this conversation, Tamara Nassar discusses the outcomes of programme, Bait Byout’s other activities, and why playing games – and playing pretend –still matters for both adults and children in the midst of war and occupation. 

    The conversation also touches on Tiny Steps in Heaven, a larp created in remebrance of child casualties, as well as the work in support of traumatised children Bait Byout is preparing and seeking partners for.

    Tamara Nassar is an experienced larper and the lead game designer at Bait Byout, as well as its Projects Coordinator, responsible for projects like Drosos (the Larp Factory). She contributed to the 2015 book Birth of Larp in the Arab World. In 2025, her larp about the children of Gaza, Tiny Steps in Heaven, was on the programme for Knutepunkt Week in Oslo, Norway, and the Immersion larp festival in Turku, Finland.

  • Community Building as a Coping Mechanism – Carnelian King

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    Sometimes we wonder, is larp escapism? Does it have to be? Carnelian speaks about his work with Monstrous Immersive in creating a community in Berlin specifically tailored to be a safer space for neurodivergent queers, and share thoughts about what he learned from this experience. He will discuss larp writing as a form of activism and tips to make a community stay cohesive.

    Carnelian is a trans nonbinary American living in Berlin for the last decade. He has worked as a professional dungeon master, freelance event designer creating custom larps for companies such as Wizards of the Coast, and has for the past 3 years has been organizing a LARP community in Berlin called Monstrous Immersive.

  • Playing to Live Elsewise – Maiju Tarpila

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    In her talk Maiju Tarpila presents the Manifesto of Playing to Live Elsewise, a collection of principles that suggest a starting point for practising larp in the times of the ecocrisis.

    Maiju Tarpila is a Finnish artist and pedagogue who’s larp practise is embedded in questions of community, resilience and living within the ecocrisis. Her previous work includes larps such as Projekti X, Viimeiset and the Kaski-trilogy. At the moment she teaches larp at the University of Arts Helsinki and is working on a two year grant on larps that imagine and embody experience beyond fossil capitalism. For there to be a future filled with play, there needs to be huge shift in how we live and play.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen

  • Our black blind spot: A call to climate action – Søren Lyng Ebbehøj

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    Climate change represents the gravest challenge yet to face mankind. International larping — however progressive and beneficial in other scopes — mostly contributes to the crisis: not the solution. This is a call to action.

    The speaker (Søren) has asked to add the following corrections:

    The thoughts presented in the video are based on the work and insights of Nór Hernø, Eva Maersk and Søren Ebbehøj – the original KP23 sustainability team – Any conclusions or recommendations presented here or elsewhere do not necessarily reflect the views of the other team members or KP23.

    The pie chart and numbers presented in the video are based on calculations by Nór Hernø and Søren Ebbehøj as part of the initial work on Knudepunkt 2023 in Denmark. Also, some of the concepts in the talk (greenhushing in particular) were brought into the larp discourse by Nór Hernø.

    Søren apologizes sincerely for leaving that information out of the presentation and recognizes the importance of the work done by Nór and Eva. Søren never intended to ignore the work of the other team members.

    Note: In the talk, Søren mentions the emissions from KP22 in Sweden incorrectly. The pie chart shown is based on calculations made for a theoretical KP based on a series of estimates in 2022. The footprint from participant transportation was calculated based on the countries of origins of participants at KP22 in Sweden as a model of the participants of the upcoming KP23 in Denmark. Thus, when Søren talks about KP22, he should have said “the model calculations of a theoretical KP in Denmark with the participant spread of KP22 in Sweden”.

    Søren Ebbehøj 2024-04-17

    Søren Ebbehøj is a Danish larp organizer and engineer working in climate and energy politics. Søren has been a co-organizer of four large-scale Nordic larps and a handful of conventions including Knudepunkt 2019. From his everyday job, Søren has almost ten years of experience with developing and implementing climate policy — something he utilized in the initial work on Knudepunkt 2023, formulating the sustainability strategy and initial mapping of the KP19 carbon footprint.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen

  • The Wisdom of the Community – Juhana Pettersson

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    In 22 years, the Knudepunkt community has published 29 books that together form the greatest collection of larp writing in the world. This talk explores that legacy, the current situation of the KP book and its future.

    Juhana Pettersson is a Finnish writer, novelist and roleplaying game and larp designer, who has edited two Knudepunkt books – Knudepunkt books are also his topic today. His larps include Luminescence, Halat hisar, End of the Line, Enlightenment in Blood, Parliament of Shadows, Redemption and Saturnalia. He’s currently working at Renegade Games Studios as the Lead Developer for the World of Darkness series of roleplaying game releases.

  • The Great Larp Swindle – Steve Deutsch & Larson Kasper

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    You also hate having to decide if you’d rather talk to wonderful people or listen to amazing talks instead of playing a 5 hour larp during KP? What if we just spent the whole weekend playing larps instead? This is the idea we had 12 years ago when organising our first IFOL.

    Steve Deutsch is a German larp wright, facilitator and event manager. He was part of the team creating the German larp conference, Mittelpunkt, and is guilty of coauthoring one of Germany’s most complex and loathed Boffer Larp Rules Systems. Nowadays, he mostly runs larps on sailing ships and for companies who want to understand their power dynamics, communication and unwritten rules.

    Larson Kasper is a professional Educator and Coach. He uses Edu-Larp as a method in his work with troubled kids as well as in the field of political education. Over the last 25 years he wrote, orgnised and facilitated multiple Larps and related events. Nowerdays he sudies “Counseling in the Workplace” and hopes to use the skills and overall experiance he gained as a larpwright, organiser and facilitator in his new area of work.

  • Learning to love the larp – Burnout culture in larp organisation – Sandy Bailly

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    Organizer burnout is an issue in our larp community, but have we stopped to think about how it might not be an individual, but a cultural problem we’re facing here? In this talk, Sandy Bailly will touch on the issue of burnout culture in larp organization, and she will equally argue how we already have the tools to do better, as we are already using them in how we educate our players.

    Sandy Bailly is a Belgian larper who occasionally also crews, writes, designs and organises larps. She is interested in small, collaborative and altruistic play in larp, and she believes in re-imagining reality through play and building communities of care.

  • What Knutepedia Actually Taught Us – Jamie Macdonald

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    During the pandemic, Jamie MacDonald and Jaakko Stenros ran a series of Zoom-based Nordic larp virtual pub quizzes, called Knutepedia. We ended up learning some things about our community in the process.

    Jamie MacDonald arrived at Nordic larp through the theater and performance route, and over the last decade has written extensively on the potentials and pitfalls of that field’s crossovers with larp. He is also the co-creator of a series of theater/larp pieces, like Walkabout and The Lovers’ Matchmaking Agency, along with Aarni Korpela. He is Canadian and lives in Finland, where he is pursuing a PhD on stand-up comedy performance.

  • I Was Dangerous Player and I’m Really Sorry – Ria Böök

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    We all make mistakes. But what to do when you are the one who puts people in real physical danger. Ria Böök tells about she being the dangerous player and what she learned from it.

    Ria Böök is a Finnish player and organizer. She organized her first larp in 2002. Sine then, she has been responsible of ie. design and character writing (Tartuntavaara / State of Infection with Jae Takala), Empty epsilon scenarios and coding (Odysseus), kitchen (Pyhävuoren perilliset x 5) and safety (Merirosvopoukama / The Pirate Cove). Ria’s special interest is accessibility, especially for visually impaired.

  • The Piss Room – Juhana Pettersson

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    Whether it’s about the longevity of our community, our ability to break boundaries, or basic safety, organizer wellbeing is an essential design consideration. Juhana Pettersson talks about his own experiences with larp burnout as well as possible solutions.

    Slides: The Piss Room – Juhana Pettersson

    Juhana Pettersson is a Finnish larp and roleplaying game designer, novelist and writer. The best-known larps he has worked on are Luminescence, Halat hisar and the trilogy of Vampire: the Masquerade larps End of the Line, Enlightenment in Blood and Parliament of Shadows. His most recent larp Tuhannen viillon kuolema (Death By a Thousand Cuts) was about climate change and class war.