One of the creators, Groth, gives a brief pep talk, then someone plays a James Blake ballad. In front stand the five people who prepared for weeks to be camp leaders. About 30 “rehabbers” stand around awkwardly, all dressed in red or blue, before taking seats. The assembly hall has the pine beams and calm brightness I always associate with Scandinavian public buildings. He tells me he’s a little nervous about playing our love affair “because I’ve never done a romantic Larp.” I’m nervous, too, because he appears as straight as a gastropub. Even Andreas, raised on boffer play, only recently got into it. Nordic Larp now has decades of history, but seems to barely register outside its close-knit circles.
CHAIN MAIL MINI DRESS HOW TO
To work out issues of how to keep players safe and push the limits of the form, the community gathers at Knutepunkt, an annual meeting that is as much hardcore game jam as academic conference. The events also brought distinct challenges, including the possibility of real emotional harm. The scene attracted new players, among them academics and those with an itch for unusual experiences. The Nordic Larp scene began to quietly germinate, favoring games with collaborative storytelling around intense human experiences: a tiny Norwegian village under German occupation, a failing hippie commune in the 1970s. The game, which cost about $200 to produce, let players experience the end of the world. No weapons except the nuclear warheads falling outside. One defining Finnish Larp from 1998, Ground Zero, was set in the thick of the Cold War and unfolded in a basement mocked up to look like an Oklahoma bomb shelter. Freewheeling experiments in genre followed. Some Nordic players began to wonder why they couldn’t abandon the long shadow of Dungeons & Dragons and hop into worlds by, say, Ingmar Bergman or Lars von Trier. Not only did he pen the love poems, he also brought a slick blue sweater that he’d knitted himself.īut in the 1990s, an offshoot of that kind of play took root in Finland and Scandinavia. But the way Andreas talks about North, it’s clear he’s gone much deeper. I tell Andreas what I’ve read, which is that Ferret is overeager and hopes the therapy will work. Beyond that information in the character sheets, I haven’t thought up any details to help make Ferret come alive. North is a poet, I’ve had a rough home life, and our characters have shared a first, stolen kiss. The game starts in 20 minutes, and I’m realizing I’m nowhere near ready.Īndreas is here to help me flesh out my relationship with his character, North. But as I’ve just discovered, a lot of the setup in a Larp falls to players. Conversion camps are places that pressure young queer people into denying their sexuality, and years of work have gone into making this place feel authentic. We’re going to pretend this is a gay conversion therapy camp. A flag hoisted over the quad reads, “Helping you become natural.”
Soon it will go by its Larp name, the Centre for Action. The buildings are owned by a Copenhagen teachers union, but for this week the walls are plastered with images of bland straight couples. The fourth side gives out onto rye fields and the occasional farmhouse copied right from a tin of butter cookies. The retreat center is surrounded on three sides by old-growth forest and, beyond that, the Kattegat Sea. We’re on the Djursland peninsula of Jutland.
As luck would have it, one of the buzziest Nordic Larps coming out of the pandemic-called The Future Is Straight-would take place not more than an hour away. I was already traveling to Denmark for a family trip in the fall of 2021. Or hang out in an alternate reality where women held all the social power, or attend a Fourth of July barbecue at a Polish reimagining of an Ohio trailer park. You could spend several days in The Secret History, the 1992 novel about murderous kids at a small New England college. These underground games, played mostly in northern Europe, took players on thinky head trips. I caught wind of a different scene, though-that of Nordic Larps. But that swords and wizards stuff had never been my exact flavor of geek. Without much trouble, you could have a high-end experience of whacking some poor guy dressed as an orc. The Larp scene had exploded in the decades since my brother’s DIY adventures, as I discovered one night while doomscrolling. Almost everyone I knew was ready to drop not only their jobs and apartments but-if possible-reality itself. It was that first brutal, boring pandemic winter. I didn’t think about his chain mail gambit until two years ago.
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