Tag: larp

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2022 Linköping Talks

Reading Larps – Hanne Grasmo

Larps exist outside the ephemeral reality of the activity of larping. Larps are published as books and archived as PDFs. In these formats, larps can be read, without playing them, if you have the literacy.

In the spring of 2022, Hanne Grasmo browsed through 2303 documented larps in search of European larp scripts published in English or Nordic languages. In this talk she discusses the importance of the larp script, rants about archiving larps, and ponders what features are needed for a larp to be published.

Hanne Grasmo is a Norwegian larp designer, sociologist, educator, and writer. She published the first popular science book about Nordic Larp in 1998, co-founded the Knutepunkt conferences, and is well-known for the world-touring larp Just a Little Lovin’; last year the full larp script of 630 pages was published as a book. Hanne is currently employed as a Doctoral researcher in Game Culture Studies at Tampere University, researching Role-play and Sexual Arousal.

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2022 Linköping Talks

The Lion, the Witch and the Workshop – Olivia Fischer

Workshop design is an essential part of larp design. In her talk, Olivia Fischer shares some thoughts on workshop design from the perspective of an education specialist.

Olivia Fischer is an Austrian larp designer, lecturer, and researcher at the University College Of Teacher Education Vienna. She has been designing larps for more than 20 years and she has given workshops and talks on larp and edularp for larpers and larp designers and also for teachers, university lecturers, and other interested persons.

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2022 Linköping Talks

Pimp My Magic School – Mike Pohjola

In magic school larps, kids play young witches and wizards who go to school to study alchemy, telepathy, healing, runes, and other supernatural subjects. In his talk, Mike Pohjola talks about how his local magic school works – and how last Saturday, they tried something a little different.

Mike Pohjola is a Finnish novelist, playwright, entrepreneur, activist, and game designer. He has written several published tabletop roleplaying games, designed and organized dozens of larps, wrote the Manifesto of the Turku School when he was 21, and in his thesis argued that Aristotle really missed out on larping on account of living in Ancient Greece. Mike stopped being a goth idol to explore the life of a middle-aged dad.

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2021 Oslo Talks

What Knutepedia Actually Taught Us – Jamie Macdonald

During the pandemic, Jamie MacDonald and Jaakko Stenros ran a series of Zoom-based Nordic larp virtual pub quizzes, called Knutepedia. We ended up learning some things about our community in the process.

Jamie MacDonald arrived at Nordic larp through the theater and performance route, and over the last decade has written extensively on the potentials and pitfalls of that field’s crossovers with larp. He is also the co-creator of a series of theater/larp pieces, like Walkabout and The Lovers’ Matchmaking Agency, along with Aarni Korpela. He is Canadian and lives in Finland, where he is pursuing a PhD on stand-up comedy performance.

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2021 Oslo Talks

I Was Dangerous Player and I’m Really Sorry – Ria Böök

We all make mistakes. But what to do when you are the one who puts people in real physical danger. Ria Böök tells about she being the dangerous player and what she learned from it.

Ria Böök is a Finnish player and organizer. She organized her first larp in 2002. Sine then, she has been responsible of ie. design and character writing (Tartuntavaara / State of Infection with Jae Takala), Empty epsilon scenarios and coding (Odysseus), kitchen (Pyhävuoren perilliset x 5) and safety (Merirosvopoukama / The Pirate Cove). Ria’s special interest is accessibility, especially for visually impaired.

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2021 Oslo Talks

Beautiful Boredom – Jaakko Stenros

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.

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2021 Oslo Talks

How to Use Larp to Improve Your Relationships – Carnelian King

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.

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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.