Organizing larps and larp-related events can leave people prone to burnout. This talk looks at why this happens, and how participants, and organizers themselves, can try to avoid it.
Mo Holkar is a UK larper, larp designer, and larp organizer. He works within the design collective Larps on Location and was one of the lead organizers of The Smoke: London’s International Larp Festival, and of The Game Kitchen design workshop. He has experienced his share of burnout, and didn’t like it.
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.
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.
Larp designers use transparency to make players aware of what might occur and to push the story forward. But how to approach the opposite task: a design that’s based on something that the players know definitely isn’t going to happen — but that is nonetheless the focus of play for the characters. How do we deal with this conflict? Laura Wood and Mo Holkar will talk through the tools that they used to achieve this in On Location, a weekend larp that ran recently in the UK.
Laura Wood has designed and organised several larps which have run in the UK, Sweden, Estonia, Russia and Germany. She is an organiser of The Smoke, London’s International Larp Festival, is an organiser of The Immersivists Club, a London based group that run chamber larps on a regular basis, a designer and organiser of On Location and has run events and workshops about safety and diversity in the larping and story gaming community.
Mo Holkar is a British larp designer and organizer. He is an organizer of The Smoke, London’s International Larp Festival; is an editor at nordiclarp.org; and is an organizer of The Game Kitchen, a monthly larp design workshop in London. He has presented programme items at KP/SK’ and written for its books; and his chamber larps have been run all over Europe, and beyond. Most recently he was a designer and organizer of the larp On Location.