Nordic Larp Talks

Tag: larp

  • Larping Fascism to Understand the Allure of Toxic Communities – Katrine Wind

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    Some people today watch their peers drift into extremist forums, conspiracy theories, and other toxic communities. At the same time, many societies are shifting in a more authoritarian direction. If we dismiss the people drawn to these spaces as simply stupid or hateful, we fail to understand what is actually happening – and we lose our ability to respond to it.

    In this talk, Katrine Wind presents Epos Daimon, a Nordic larp for teenagers that allows participants to experience life as an esteemed member of an authoritarian system from the inside. By exploring how fascist and hate-based systems can feel meaningful rather than threatening, the larp creates a deeper understanding of their emotional appeal and why that appeal makes them so powerful.

    Katrine Wind is a Nordic larp designer, writer, and speaker known for Daemon as well as co-designing Spoils of War and Helicon. While based in Denmark, she has run her larps internationally across Europe and the US in collaboration with local producers.

    Her designs focus on strong social structures, highly playable characters and relations, as well as mechanics and pacing to support immediate emotional impact (naming the approach River Rafting Design). Katrine regularly writes and lectures on larp design, contributing to concepts such as Dyadic Play, River Rafting Design, Dinner Warfare, and Playing an Engaging Victim to the international larp community.

    Professionally, Katrine is a political scientist working with leadership, digitalization, and organizational structures.

  • Song scene stage – Designing for performance arts in larp – Suus Mutsaers

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    We all know those moments: singing a shanty around a campfire, or school larps where drama is part of the curriculum. But what design questions can we, as designers, ask ourselves when incorporating performing arts into our LARP experiences?

    Suus Mutsaers is a larp designer working at the intersection of play, immersive experience design, and education. After leaving performing arts school at 18 they studied education and social work, and are currently pursuing a Master’s in Transformative Game Design. Suus is driven by curiosity about why play affects us so deeply and their work often explores isolated communities.

  • There Must be a Simpler Way – three ways to less work on character writing – Trine Lise Lindahl

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    Many a larp designer has struggled while writing page up and page down of unique character texts. In this talk Trine gives three examples of larps that have used reusable elements to reduce the time and work that go into writing a large number of characters, while maintaining the quality.

    Trine Lise Lindahl is an experienced larp designer, communicator and community organizer based in Oslo, Norway. She has co-designed multiple notable larps, including Mad About the Boy (2010), Play the Cards (2012), KoiKoi (2014), and 1942 – Someone to trust? (2017). She produced, edited and wrote for the anthology Larps from the Factory (2013) that pioneered the rerunnable chamber larp as a viable format of Nordic larp, and taught character writing at The Larpwriter Summer School. She has a background in history, education and design, and works as a content designer.

  • Body and Soul – Inge-Mette Petersen

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    Often, we analyze larp as an intellectual experience, we describe the acts and tell the war stories of our characters as if they only took place in our mind. But larp is different from almost any other game, we dress up, move and act as someone else, acting out genders, ages and social classes not our own in settings from history, movies and fantasy. We use our body and soul, but what do we see when we look in the mirror? This will not be a talk that gives the final answer, but maybe it can be a beginning to a new way to look at larp.

    Inge-Mette is a teacher who until now has worked as a reenactor and education officer at the Danish Open-Air Museum. She started larping in 2016, and has been doing so regularly since then, mostly international larps. She has an MA in Pedagogy and is finishing an MA in Transformative Game Design from Uppsala University.

  • Facilitating Metareflections – Nór Hernø

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    In this talk, Nór Hernø introduces how metareflections and multiverses intersect: and how designers can initiate player metareflections, as well as establish group consensus, by utilizing different methods of facilitation.

    Nór Hernø (they/them) is a Danish larper and larp designer with more than 25 years of experience. Throughout the years, they have lectured in narratology, larp- and workshop design, and worked professionally with process facilitation, larp-, learning- and experience design. On a volunteer basis, Nór organizes community events, teaches and mentors new larp designers, and is dedicated to supporting fellow larp designers and local communities.

  • A Season of Work, Chaos, and Fun! The KP26 Book – Frederikke Sofie Bech Høyer, Simon Brind, Anne Grove

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    The Knutebooks are the embodiment of the longstanding tradition of codifying what, how, and why we as a community play, design, think, and push towards new futures of larp. In this talk you will get to know this year’s book and how to be part of future books.

    Simon Brind is a writer, academic, and larp designer from London. His PhD thesis is about the emergent narratology of and moments of narrative crisis in participatory fiction. He is a part of the Avalon Larp Studio collective, as well as author and part of the editorial team of this book.

    Anne Serup Grove is a service designer specialising in interactions and communication across both the private and public sectors. She has since the 2019 volume Larp Design been a significant contributor to multiple KP publications. She is lead designer on this book and part of the team of next year’s book.

    Frederikke Sofie Bech Høyer is a larp designer who works at Østerskov Efterskole, where she creates, teaches, and facilitates larps. She has a master’s degree in Communication Studies, is an author in this book, and is part of the team for next year’s.

  • Shadows of the Backstory: Shadow relations as a tool to bring internal play to the surface – Lara Hartung

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    The inner lives of characters can offer a lot of play. In her talk, Lara Hartung presents a relationship mechanic that can make backstories come alive, externalize inner conflicts and enable direct interaction with distant or abstract themes: Shadow Relations.

    Lara Hartung is a larp designer, writer and science communicator from Germany.  As a member of the design collective Fractured Reality Studios, she is a lead designer for Blankspace and has worked on Greylight 2142.

  • 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.

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

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    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

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    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.