Category: Talks

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2021 Oslo Talks

Mapping Your Way Out of Awkwardness – Eleanor Saitta

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.

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2021 Oslo Talks

Online Larp Design: Pitfalls and Opportunities – Karolina Soltys

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.

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2021 Oslo Talks

No More Hero: Larp as a Collective Journey – Alessandro Giovannucci

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.

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2021 Oslo Talks

Dream a Little Dream with Me – Karin Edman

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.

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2021 Oslo Books Talks

Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices – The 2021 Knutepunkt Book Team

The editorial team presents the book published in conjunction with the Knutepunkt 2021 conference: Book of Magic: Vibrant Fragments of Larp Practices

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2019 Odense Talks

The Piss Room – Juhana Pettersson

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.

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2019 Odense Talks

Costumes for real bodies – Anne Serup Grove

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.

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2019 Odense Talks

Two tools to structure a larp – Kaisa Kangas

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.

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2019 Odense Talks

Fleshing the Skeleton – How to empower players to make characters their own, without the risk of ‘breaking the larp’ – Mo Holkar

Mo Holkar talks about the fertile middle ground between larpwright-designed and player-designed characters; and how to empower players to make characters their own without the risk of their creativity breaking the larp.

Slides: Fleshing the Skeleton – How to empower players to make characters their own, without the risk of ‘breaking the larp’ – Mo Holkar

Mo Holkar is a UK larp designer and organizer. He is an editor at nordiclarp.org, and an organizer of The Smoke: London’s International Larp Festival. As well as his own designs, he has written characters for other people’s larps ranging from Fairweather Manor to Suffragette! to Reborn.

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2019 Odense Talks

Lost in Love – from DJ to GM – Simon Brind

Are there any similarities between the arts of DJing and GMing. In his talk Simon Brind draws some parallels between the two forms.

Slides: Lost in Love – from DJ to GM – Simon Brind

Simon Brind is a British larp designer and academic. His PhD research “Combat Narratology: Strategies for the resolution of narrative crisis in participatory fiction,” looks at how stories emerge in larp. He has been writing larps since 1986. From 1988-2008 he was a goth/alternative DJ and club promoter. During that time he played gigs and club nights across Europe and North America.