In t r o d u c t i o n
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This book documents and celebrates the Nordic tradition of live action role-playing games, a powerful and unique form of expression that has emerged and developed during the last fifteen years. Any book that attempts to document the Nordic larp culture must address the fundamental quality of larp as an evanescent form of expression. Larps are ephemeral. They cease to exist the moment they become complete. They can only be perceived as wholes once they have already vanished. Thousands of hours of preparation, costuming, building and playing only exist in memories, stories, photographs and old props now serving as souvenirs from alternate realities. Documenting these events is not easy. Each player in a larp undergoes a unique, personal journey. Larp provides no shared core experience. Nordic larps have not been documented systematically. While article collections by players, larpmakers and researchers have been published annually since 2003, the Knutepunkt books are more about perfecting the art than documenting individual games. A few years ago we came across Allan Kaprow’s Assemblage, Environment & Happenings. It is a fascinating book, published in 1966, offering a window to a wonderful, exciting and different world, a snapshot of an ephemeral tradition of performance art. Filled with entertaining descriptions, enigmatic recipes and enticing photographs, the tome documents the art scene Kaprow and his friends were engaged in. The book showed us a place both alien and familiar. The Happenings of the 1960s seemed to have no connection to the games we were playing, yet the pictures conveyed a familiar feeling. Looking at those pictures and reading those texts made us approach larp from a different angle: Is this what it is like to look at larp photographs? What is really going on in these images, do we even recognize what is relevant? Is it possible to understand these pictures without being there? How did the participants feel about their costumes, props and make-up? Ultimately Kaprow’s book inspired this one. We wanted to create a document that explains and celebrates Nordic larp, something that while personal, still places the experiences in a context. We wanted to transmit the awesomeness of these events, and prevent them from slipping into obscurity. Ultimately we hope that this book will inspire the same kind of excitement in its readers as Kaprow’s did in us.
Knutepunkt At the heart of the Nordic larp tradition lies the Knutepunkt convention. It is an informal event with a casual atmosphere, weird larps, brilliant discussions, obscure drinking games and odd inside jokes that attracts role-playing enthusiasts of all stripes. Tracking down the convention is not always easy; there is no stable organization behind it, not even a single website. The name of the event changes from Knutepunkt (Norway) to Knutpunk (Sweden), Knudepunkt (Denmark) and Solmukohta (Finland). Fortunately, many have discovered the northern community through word of mouth or by reading the annual books, available on the web for free. Larpers have travelled to Knutepunkt from all over Europe, from the United States, the Middle East and even South America, attracted by the audacity and joyful megalomania of this creative community: Animatronic dragons! Refugee politics! Cancer immersion in flour! We have chosen thirty larps to represent the diversity of larping, ranging from perhaps the first “international” Nordic larp, Trenne byar, organized in the summer of 1994, to Delirium, played in the summer of 2010. This book represents the spectrum of different genres, styles and design paradigms as well as attitudes towards practical production issues. The selected games range from six players to a thousand, and they lasted from an afternoon to a week. The production times range from a day to several years. Despite numerous differences, certain common threads tie all of these larps together into one tradition. The migration of design philosophies, ideological aims and direct influences is obvious. The reader will certainly notice ideas and tropes from early games echoing and evolving throughout the years. But the extraordinary foundation of Nordic larp rests on a deeper similarity: the ambition, passion and dedication of the players and larpwrights. Every single game portrayed in this book was born out of a desire to make the most powerful, the most interesting or the most novel larp possible.
Documenting Larp This book documents fifteen years of larp in a single volume. We obviously hope to create a book of memories and basis for bragging rights for the community, but especially we aim to offer an
❮ Mad About the Boy (2010), inspired by the comic book Y: The Last Man, was a larp about a world where all the men had suddenly died. In one run of the game, all players were female (aside from the last man). In the second run, men could also play female characters. (Diegetic, Li Xin)