Nordic Larp Talks

Tag: larp design

  • Joy – Larp and Resistance – Lizzie Stark

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    Larp has a role to play in times of crisis. US designer Lizzie Stark discusses how Six of Hounds, her design collab with Jason Morningstar, has responded to urgent world events.

    Lizzie Stark is the author of three non-fiction books. She got into larp after reporting for her first, Leaving Mundania. Her most recent book is Egg: A Dozen Ovatures, which explores the world’s largest cellular workhorse – from chickens to penguins, and art to crime. Lizzie is also an award-winning game designer. Over the years she’s collaborated on two pieces of playable theater, dozens of short larps, and on editing the collections #Feminism and Larps from the Factory. Her work has appeared at numerous festivals including IndieCade, Future of Storytelling, Stockholm Fringe Festival, and Fastaval. Design clients include the Peabody Essex Museum and the Kennedy Center. In 2020, she and collaborator Jason Morningstar became the first non-Danes in Fastaval’s history to win the coveted best scenario Otto for their comedy The Lesser Player’s Tale.

  • 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.

  • Play at Scale – Caro Murphy

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    The creative success but business failure of projects like Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser prove that masses of people want to roleplay in themed immersive environments – but not everyone can afford to pay what it takes to create and sustain them. So the question becomes: can this artform be brought to the masses without sacrificing quality, depth, and intimacy of experience?

    Caro Murphy is an educator, game, and experience designer who is obsessed with creating systems that make live action roleplaying more accessible, inclusive, and fulfilling. Their ultimate wish in life is to train the next generation of game designers and design themself into irrelevance. They are privileged and honored to have worked in the immersive sphere with Disney, Sage & Jester, Green Door Labs, their own production company Incantrix Productions, as well as many other larp companies worldwide; and have won awards from the THEA to Immies.

  • Agency versus Sovereignty – Adrian Hon

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    Many people believe larps and immersive experiences will give them the agency they lack in everyday life. Adrian Hon argues this is merely relative to other media, and that the promise of “sovereignty” exerts an even stronger, darker pull.

    Adrian Hon is a Scottish game designer and writer. He is co-creator of the smartphone fitness game Zombies, Run!, and the alternate reality game Perplex City, and has worked on multiple projects with Disney Imagineering. Adrian is currently Associate Artist at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and is writing a book about the history and rise of immersive art.

  • Contingency plans and replaceability – Steve Deutsch

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    Most larpmakers have felt sometimes that larp production will be the death of them – usually because we are in practice irreplacable. In this talk, Steve shares a story of larpmaking literally coming close to killing them and what the experience taught them learned about resilient production.

    Steve Deutsch is a German larpwright, facilitator, event manager, and event guide. Just recently, they were part of the team creating der Larp Conference in Germany. Steve is guilty of coauthoring one of Germany’s most complex and loathed Boffer Larp Rules Systems, but nowadays mostly run rules-light larps on sailing ships – as well as larp events helping companies explore their internal power dynamics, communication and unwritten rules.

  • 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

  • Silently Patching the Magic Circle – Mo Holkar

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    We talk about larp as taking place within a ‘magic circle’ that separates ‘larp reality’ from the ‘real reality’ outside in the real world. And if everyone larps as intended, then the circle can be maintained smoothly — right? Mo Holkar is here to talk about ways in which participants — and perhaps some types of role especially — can find themselves unexpectedly doing unacknowledged work to patch holes in the magic circle. And to ask: should we be recognizing and planning for this need?

    Mo Holkar is a UK larper, designer and organizer. His recent projects include working on Reunion; Bubbles: a hot-tub larp anthology; and the upcoming A Place of Greater Safety. He is part of the Larps on Location design collective, and is an editor at nordiclarp.org. Mo’s articles about larp have appeared in many KP-books and elsewhere; and a bunch of his chamber larps are available to download from holkar.net

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen

  • Inclusion in larp: Between challenge and the experience of limits – Björn Butzen

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    Björn Butzen is talking about the fact that “Diversity is a reality. Inclusion is a choice!” and why we struggle with this. We as a community cannot deny it: there is still a lack of disabled larpers and we have to improve our actions in order to be more inclusive. With this talk Björn wants to share some thoughts, what larp designers and organisers could do to change that.

    Björn Butzen is an educational consultant for volunteer services. He is playing larps since 2014 and mostly co-organises events related to minilarps. As a participant in workshops on the topic of safety in larp, he contributes the perspective of disabled people, especially with regard to the tension between personal responsibility and heteronomy. Among other things, he also advises larp organisers on design documents and concrete implementation in order to find inclusive ways of enabling disabled or restricted people to participate in events.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen

  • Re-designing a ready larp – Laura Kröger

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    More and more larps are being rerun. Laura Kröger talks about redesigning a larp before running it again. When should an existing larp be redesigned and when it shouldn’t. Case example in her talk is Odysseus 2024.

    Laura Kröger is a Finnish producer and narrative designer with over 20 years of experience for creating larps. During the past decade she has been especially active on rerunning larps. Laura has been a narrative lead in larps such as Pyhävuoren perilliset – Heirs of Saint Hill (run 7 times) and Shadows in Time (run 15 times). For international audiences she is best known as lead producer and narrative designer in Odysseus. An epic space drama that was run 3 times in summer 2019 and will return with 3 more runs in summer 2024.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen

  • Nukes, Pandemics and Teenagers – Martin Nielsen

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    Since 2018, humanist confirmants have played the larp The Outpost as part of their education on ethics and philosophy. The larp, created by Alibier on a commission basis from the Humanist society in Norway, gives the teenagers tough dilemmas in a post-apocalyptic setting. Martin Nielsen, lead designer in Alibier, tells the story of how they haven taken thousands of confirmants into a world of nukes and pandemics the past seven years.

    Martin Nielsen is a Norwegian larpmaker and event organizer. His works include larps such as Allegiance, To The Wonder and Fallen Stars, as well as events such as Grenselandet, Knutepunkt and the Larpwriter Summer School. Except for two years when he was in politics, Martin has been the manager of the Oslo-based roleplaying company Alibier since 2015.

    Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen