Sometimes just hanging out in character in a larp, being bored, is wonderful. What is that all about? How can boredom be an aesthetic experience?
Jaakko Stenros (PhD) is a game and play scholar working at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies at Tampere University. He has published nine books and over 50 articles and reports and has taught game studies for a decade. He gave his previous Nordic Larp Talk eight years ago on defining Nordic Larp.
This talk is about how to use one on one role-playing encounters to make your friendships and dates more interesting. It is an overview of two player games for the development of all types of relationships.
It will explain how to interact with the characters who are in your friend’s heads and how to plan for more meaningful experiences.
Carnelian King is professional dungeon master from Tennessee, USA. They live in Berlin where they have founded a role-playing game society. They are a nonbinary larp-write who has worked for Wizards of the Coast designing a role-playing marketplace for their D&D Live, Descent into Avernus. They specialize in rituals, fire spinning, performing contact juggling. When they are not organizing larps they work for Roll 20, running all different table top games and like to also plan interactive theater events, festivals and role+playing installations. They are working on developing larps for use as gender therapy as well as to make games for prisons.
The start of play is awkward for many folks — but why? In this talk, we’ll explain what a “map” is and give some tips to help make the start of your next larp work better for you.
Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, artist, designer, writer, and barbarian making a living and vocation of understanding how complex, trans-disciplinary systems and stories fail and redesigning them to fail better. She has been active in the larp scene since 2011 and has edited two KP books, The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp and What Do We Do When We Play? She currently lives in Finland, where she’s part of the team behind The Attic, a space for queer performance, politics, art, and music.
Karolina will share what she has learnt about designing online larps: how to avoid the pitfalls specific to online play, but also how to benefit from the unique opportunities it offers.
Karolina Soltys is a UK-based larp designer creating Nordic-style larps, both in-person and online. Her larps include Our Last Year, The Castle, Together Forever, The Glimpse and Arsenic & Lies.
We are storytelling animals. We all love stories and we need that. But there is a potential clash between storytelling and experience, between narrative and participation. Is the larp killing storytelling? Or is it reinforcing it? Let’s see if we can learn something from this mess: ideas, reflections and hopefully a weapon against capitalism.
Alessandro Giovannucci is an Italian award-winner larp designer and theorist. He co-founded Chaos League and wrote the Southern Way manifesto. As an organizer he wrote international larp (Sahara Expedition, Bunker 101, Black Friday) and chamber larp translated in several languages. Alessandro is also a musician and a lecturer, curious, friendly and proudly antifa. And he sucks at writing short bios.
Karin presents how they work with vivid dreams to create their larps and how others also could increase their chance at vivid dreams to use for creative inspiration.
Karin Edman is a Swedish larp writer and runner who focuses on queer alternative history with supernatural elements. Their most known works are Witches of Ästad Farm and Vedergällningen (The Vengeance). Pronouns she/they.
The editorial team presents the book published in conjunction with the Knutepunkt 2021 conference: Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices
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.
To the larp maker, costuming is a practical matter; to the participant an emotional one. Sizing should be simple, but it isn’t. In her talk Anne Grove shares why this is and what to do about it from a larp maker point of view.
Slides: Costumes for real bodies – Anne Serup Grove
Anne Grove is a Danish larp maker and professional design thinker. She has been part of the Fastaval team for more than 12 years, and has produced larps in both Denmark and Sweden, most recently The Solution. Usually you will not find her at center stage but behind working with communication, volunteer management and safety. Currently, Anne is involved in a large scale safety project involving both Fastaval, Bifrost and Rollespilsakademiet.
There are two basic tools to structure a larp: scheduling pre-determined content and designing for emergent content. In her talk, Kaisa Kangas gives some insight on how to use them.
Slides: Two tools to structure a larp – Kaisa Kangas
Kaisa Kangas is a Finnish larp designer with more than 20 years of experience with making and playing larps. Her most known work is the Palestinian-Finnish larp Halat hisar (2013, 2016). She is also an editor for the Solmukohta 2016 books, Larp Politics and Larp Realia, and a contributor in many KP books. Kaisa is currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Helsinki. She also holds a BA in Japanese Studies.