Nordic Larp Talks

Category: 2025 Oslo

  • Larp in  Wartime: Palestine – Tammy Nassar

    ,

    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.

  • What Medieval Spirituality Taught Me About Intimacy in Larp – Áron Levente

    ,

    What’s at stake in admitting that we are nothing but relationships? This talk explores how religious communities from the Middle Ages and their writings about spiritual intimacy can reimagine how we think about intimacy larp. The talk dips our into bodies in ecstasy, the power of ‘You’, how to trust lies beyond consent, and the joys of attempting the impossible together with our pals.

    Áron Levente (fka Áron Birtalan) is an artist, musician and student of theology whose work explores languages of intimacy. Working with relationships and sense perception as artistic materials, they host games, workshops, performances and unruly thoughts. Áron’s background in role-playing comes from an experimental fantasy camp they were involved in between 1999-2022 in rural Hungary. Their publications, engaging with (role-)playing, somatics and spiritual practice, include 2018’s The Critical Escape and 2023’s The Abyss Between Our Hands. Áron is currently a doctoral candidate at SKH’s Institute of Dance in Stockholm and runs the studio Angel Dog Hospitality Service in Vienna. Their artistic dissertation, Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come is due in 2026.

  • How to make larp at the end of the world – Jamie Macdonald

    ,

    Larp as artistic research is a small but exciting field. This talk offers insights from such work and makes some sugestions about what the field of art as research can offer larp. In addition to existing structures to guide larp documentation and collaboration with other fields, artistic research proposes frameworks for thinking about what kind of knowledge is created when we larp, and how larp can ask questions.

    Jamie MacDonald is a larper, comedian, and PhD student from Canada but firmly planted in Helsinki. He curates queer performance spaces, especially in performance genres that are not part of the museum and institutional culture. His thesis concerns emotional labour and affective labour in transgender stand-up comedy, and also takes the form of a stand-up show. He has written several articles about crossovers between larp and theatre and the aesthetics of larp, and in general enjoys poking at ideas and their boundaries.

  • It’s not you, it’s me: wrestling with bleed-in of the self – Mo Holkar

    ,

    When you larp, you are you. It sounds obvious, but how often do we really think about what that really means for the characters we play, and for our larp experience? In this talk, based on the ideas of Anne Marchadier, Mo Holkar examines the phenomenon of bleed-in of the self.

    Mo Holkar is a British larper and larp designer. He is a former organizer of The Smoke and of The Game Kitchen, is an editor at nordiclarp.org, and organizes larps as a member of the Larps on Location collective. His chamber larps can be downloaded and run from holkar.net, which also links to his articles and talks on a wide variety of topics. He is currently most interested in larp as a means of exploring different ways of being.

  • Joy – Larp and Resistance – Lizzie Stark

    ,

    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

    ,

    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

    ,

    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

    ,

    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

    ,

    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.