Let me tell you about one of my favorite LARPs. In the summer of 2011, I played a closet-gay New York psychologist in a Nordic LARP called “Just a Little Lovin’.” At three July 4th parties (1982, ‘83 and ‘84), my character struggled with the slow death of his ex-wife, as well as his own self-doubts and chronic infidelity to his boyfriend in the ever-present shadow of the HIV epidemic. It was a respectful and well researched game, where breaking down in tears was expected and even treasured.
It was a great example of a Nordic LARP. When reflecting on my experience, I found myself thinking about Vampire: The Masquerade. The setting, the power of blood, the subcultural edginess, the metaphysical symbology and the violent internal struggles of the characters remind me why I fell in love with the Vampire setting back in the early ’90s. Could the methods used to make “Just a Little Lovin” such a powerful experience be used in a VTM LARP game? This essay is a product of this train of thought, presenting methods from mainstream and progressive Nordic LARP for use in Mind’s Eye Theatre.
These methods can change your game, or even rewrite it entirely, to make it accessible to participants more interested in the challenges of improvised acting and play down the competitive aspects of the hobby. Immersion Imagine that a magic circle surrounds your game. Stepping in, your players take a solemn vow to truly be their characters. To talk, walk, drink, sleep, kiss, and think as their characters, without breaking that bubble of immersion. The players choose to believe that the other players, in turn, are their characters.
As long as everyone acts within the safety rules, all of their actions occur within the magic circle of the game. The responsibility for any actions belongs to the characters, and the characters are treated accordingly. For a long time, this was the default aesthetic of Nordic games. Even though this style is being challenged by several contemporary organizers, it’s impossible to talk about Nordic LARP without pointing out its obsession with keeping the unreal as real as possible.
In an immersive game, almost everything is exactly what it appears to be. Believable, tactile, seamless, and visually impressive acting and staging is a far higher priority than simulation-like rules. Your players make a tangible effort to look like their characters. If a character is a master Sikh assassin, you could expect the player to hit the gym, grow a beard, dye his hair, learn a few Farsi expressions, and put on some spray tan. Game masters may even deliberately cast players in suitable roles, asking those who look “right” or have certain skills to perform a specific role at the game.
The venue, too, has to be correct: prepped for realism and staged for visual impact. In a Nordic LARP, if you want the game to be set on a cruise ship at sea, you rent a freaking cruise ship and sail into the night. Everything must be as real as possible. In this kind of LARP, players truly become their characters. There is no “try,” and there are no out-of-character moments. If the characters would kiss, the players kiss. If the characters run, the player must run. If the character wishes to decode a Latin text, the player must hit the books (or the internet), and if a character wishes to persuade another, the player must be ready to lay on the charm.
Characters achieve exactly what their players can get away with, acting in dramatic improvisation with their fellows. These wholly immersive games often use very simple rules systems. The rules typically govern only violent conflict or player safety. There are very few “symbolic” props in an immersive game. Items must be crafted to appear as representational as possible, depicting strange magic items, scientific gadgets, and other things as realistically as possible. You will occasionally see visual effects suitable for theatrical performances, or find NPCs or players in monster-makeup.
Nordic LARPs do use blunted weapons, soft-airguns, blank-firing guns or weapons made of latex, attempting to portray as much realism as possible while ensuring that nobody gets hurt. Blows, armed and unarmed, are commonly done in stagefighting style, using half-speed contact (or rougher, if the combatants have agreed beforehand to play “hard”). The most common system for fighting is for the losing player to decide, based on how the scene physically occurs, how hurt she is and what kind of injury she has received.
The loser of the fight ends up in the power of the winner, and must surrender items, social status, freedom, or some other important stake in the game. The fight prevents her from succeeding, and the other character’s goal is achieved. Immersion and Vampire: The Masquerade At first glance, it appears that Nordic LARP’s utterly immersive Using Nordic LARP Techniques in MET: Vampire The Masquerade Ericsson aesthetics are incompatible with VTM games. The plethora of disciplines, rituals, and even the basic physical facts of the Cainite condition are pretty much impossible for a gardenvariety human being to fully emulate.
How could the players immersively portray a character who doesn’t breathe or blink? How can they portray jumping over buildings, or moving faster than the eye can see? Those things can’t be physically simulated by the players and would break the immersion of a Nordic LARP. Option One: Change shit that doesn’t fit. A Storyteller can adjust the setting of the VTM game to make it more appropriate to fully immersive live-action play. Tweak the fundamentals, until you have a vampire myth that allows full immersion—or at least provides a cool way to emulate whatever powers vampires use in the game.
Drop the rest of the material, and don’t use it. Some readers will ask, “But isn’t that heresy? Is it really Vampire without Tzimisce flesh-crafters and Gangrel who shapeshift into wolves?” The best answer is for the Storyteller to know her audience. Is it really important to the overall story of the game that vampires don’t breathe? Would the Camarilla collapse if you remove Protean, deciding that the powers are too much work to illustrate through immersive special effects? Will the thematic power in the War of Ages be diminished if elders replace their physical disciplines with mental ones that can be acted out in-game?
In the end, these changes are up to the Storyteller, but a powerful and realistic story can certainly be told with a few changes to the world. Option Two: Choose a setting that works well within the immersive aesthetics. A Storyteller can choose to run a game with a theme that doesn’t require the more “magical” powers of VTM. Focus on thin-bloods, ghouls, revenants, hunters, mortal retainers, or the families of neonate vampires. Even in a strictly canon World of Darkness setting, these close-to-normal characters can be portrayed without resorting to any simulation rules systems at all.
The few powers they have can be managed with Nordic “meta techniques” (see below), through cooperative agreement between individual players, or through environment announcements such as, “Mortals will always get their ass kicked by Sabbat Revenants.” In this manner, the VTM setting can be a backdrop for the exploration of social issues and personal stories, in the Nordic manner. “Winning” and Nordic LARP You might think that Nordic, immersive games are starting to sound elitist.
Certainly, there is some advantage given to physically fit or exceptionally smart players in an all-immersion game. However, the games don’t play out that way, because they are not competitive. There is no “winning,” so there is no “advantage.” I should say a few words about Nordic attitudes toward player competition. It’s considered extremely bad form to deny a fellow player agency by, for instance, wrestling the other player to the ground, handcuffing them, and letting them rot in jail for the rest of the game.
Alright, some Finnish players might love it (kidding!), but most players will feel cheated. Everyone puts a lot of effort into their pre-game preparations and roleplay, so everyone should be allowed to play actively throughout the game. The same attitude prevents most killing of characters in the game. It doesn’t really matter whether you could steamroll another player by invoking your awesome sheet-stats or whether you could physically overpower them. Both would remove that player from the game—and that is not the point of a Nordic LARP.
The point is to experience something incredible, to actively engage, feel emotion, and portray a living world. Removing a character from the game removes a story from the game, and that makes everyone in the LARP— yourself included!—lose. Growth and victory often have more to do with the kinds of emotions and scenes a player wants to experience than it has to do with her character’s actual goals. Many Nordic players will tell you that they’ve had more fun when their character loses her goal (but has an awesome emotional scene) than when they gain something their character was striving to achieve.
Playing to lose is more fun than playing to win. In Nordic LARP, the players who artfully fail and create openings for others to have emotional scenes are much more celebrated than players who continually have character victories. In the Nordic LARP circles, even talking about “winning” a LARP is a suspect proposition—why would you want to win all the time? And to reiterate my previous point—if “winning” is not important, why have rules? Safewords Even the most fundamentalist immersion-game needs rules to make players feel comfortable and stay safe.
One of the most basic rules in Nordic LARP is the concept of a “safeword.” A safeword (typically “cut,” as in a movie production) is typically established for the game, and all players know that safeword before roleplay begins. Thereafter, if any player uses the game’s safeword, all roleplay stops immediately and the players sort out whatever prompted the game-break. This is one of the only times you will see Nordic LARP players breaking immersion or stepping out of character.
Having the power to stop emotional scenes at any time gives players the confidence and security to go crazy with their roleplay, while still being safe and ensuring that everyone is comfortable with the scene. “cut” is respected as a safeword, so it’s only used to indicate that things have gone too far and need to stop. Casual use of the term for any other purpose is avoided like the plague, and the word causes instant time-freeze. Other commonly used safewords are “break” and “go.” “Break” means that a player hasn’t yet reached her emotional limit, but is forewarning the other players in the scene that there may be difficulty.
When other players hear this word, they will roleplay with a little less intensity and may offer the player an in-character way out of the potentially uncomfortable scene. “Break” doesn’t necessarily stop the game in the same way as a call of “cut.” The use of the word “go” means the exact opposite of the other two safewords. In this instance, the player is telling the other individuals in the scene to step up their game. The other players can feel free to be more physical, abusive, or erotic.
You’d be surprised how often players are annoyed by their fellows using kid gloves rather than roleplaying for maximum emotional impact. Meta Techniques It’s important to remember that while the immersionist attitude is a strong foundation for LARP, it is never the endall be-all of a game. In recent years, the trend is to run games with a high level of physical fidelity (be it over-the-top surreal or deeply minimalist), using only a few, very necessary, rules that fly in the face of full purist immersion.
This juxtaposition of physical believability with a small amount of magical abstraction often creates an interesting, heightened sense of poetry and meaning for the game. “Dramatic” rules, as they are called, can be very good for the emotional impact of the game—if handled with care. So, what’s the difference between the dramatic rules of a Nordic LARP and the rules of the MET system? Some Storytellers argue that Nordic LARP creates rules designed to simulate impossible things, rather than rules designed to influence the narrative of the story.
Dramatic rules explain things or add emotional impact. They do not alter the story or give concrete advantage to one player over another. These narrative or dramatic rules are often called “meta techniques,” making them sound highbrow or difficult to institute. Don’t worry. Meta techniques can be used in any game, and they work very well to up the emotional impact for your players. In general, Nordic players approach meta techniques very seriously. These rules are not the out-of-character flippant comparison of mechanical traits or the distant-feeling description of a character performing some impossible physical action.
Even if events portrayed with the dramatic assistance of meta techniques fall outside the here-and-now of the immersive game, these events are always treated with a measure of reverence and respect by the assembled players. Players often imagine that they are on a theatre stage, actively experiencing the situations being described by the meta techniques. Storyteller descriptions of these instances or player activation of these meta techniques give everyone a shared imaginative moment, and the players roleplay out this moment as it is being described.
Players will be inspired to silence, visualizing the scenario, slowing their movements, and consciously remaining aware of the emotions being brought up by the storytelling occurring in that moment. Instead of dwelling on theory, here’s a few classic Nordic meta techniques that might be adapted for use in Vampire: The Masquerade. Option One: Bringing the Beast to Life During a game focused on the characters’ internal struggle against the Beast, Storytellers dressed in stark black-andwhite animal masks would move among the crowd.
Players would be told to ignore the presence of these individuals until they speak, whispering temptations and dark impulses in players’ ears. These meta-characters would be representations, portrayals of a vampire’s destructive tendencies. Option Two: The Black Box In order to illustrate a group of elders who are entrenched in the past, a Storyteller might set up a theatrical “black box” in one of the rooms of the game’s venue. This room is a totally empty, all-black room, where players don nondescript black robes and remove modern visual references.
At the beginning of the game, players are given two roses: one black and one red. When one player gives a red rose to another, it triggers a flashback scene from another era that will be played out between their characters. The giver of the rose acts sets the conditions of the scene. “I want to play how we fell out of love in Paris during the revolution.” The two players then proceed to the Black Box and play out an event that occurred centuries or even millennia ago, creating those memories for their characters.
When they have completed the scene, it becomes an actual memory that may be referenced in the game’s “now.” If a player gives another the black rose, they go to the Black Box and play out a different scene. The receiver of the rose tells the giver about a mortal she’s lost in the sea of time: someone she misses very deeply. The receiver sets the scene as a particular event that occurred between the two. “You are Henry, a naive socialist poet in Victorian London. We were friends.
You didn’t know I was a vampire. This is the memory in which my character finally falls to hunger and drains you to your death.” The receiver portrays her usual character, while the rose-giver takes on the role of the mortal. The scene concludes when the dramatic goal is achieved (when the receiver declares the scene finished). After the scene, the giver continues play as if the receiver’s character described the scene just played. She can use it as a source of leverage (or of empathy) toward her fellow vampire.
Option Three: Mortals A Storyteller could use a similar technique to focus the game on vampiric interactions with mortals. The trigger for the meta scene could be an offer of a drink of blood. If the other player accepts, they retire to the Black Box and play out a brief scene. In this scene, the giver steps into the shoes of the receiver’s character, and the receiver plays the last mortal on whom her character abusively fed. The receiver describes the generalities of the scene, and the giver must play the scene with as much emotional impact as possible.
As the scene ends, the receiver’s vampire character remembers her actions and may act accordingly. Option Four: Neutral Space Another way that a Storyteller can work with time is to set the whole game in a neutral space. Provide a few strong props to make simulated time periods and locations feel unique. Divide the game into Acts, with breaks between them. Each Act advances time a century. During breaks, the players discuss, taking turns to say what they would like to see happen in the next Act.
Players don’t have to limit themselves to wishes involving their own characters, but can offer suggestions that impact other characters in the game. A player might offer, “I’d love to see a scenario where the Prince went mad, and no one dared to challenge him.” These opinions are only suggestions; no one has to act on these player directions. Still, the cooperative act of sharing suggestions for the next Act will have a strong effect on the game’s overall story. As the game jumps forward from era to era, players don new costume pieces or makeup effects to show the passage of time for their characters.
Props, lighting, and decor change to set the scene, and once again, the Storyteller gathers everyone in a circle. Closing their eyes, every player listens to her introducing the new era – the new Act – and then begins the roleplay of another chapter of the game. Each Act within such a game could provide different rule systems, or different meta techniques, that impact or heighten the theme of that Act. A game about the seven deadly sins could provide a free retest to any player acting out the sin associated with each Act.
A tragic game about a doomed court could have limitations on physical roleplaying: disallowing any physical conflict in the first act, allowing only covert violence in the second, and ruling that any confrontation in the last act must ends with one or both parties facing Final Death. Within the Neutral Space LARP, any technique that the Storyteller can imagine to heighten the game’s emotional impact is possible. Theatre, movies, and even board games can inspire narrative shenanigans to add to the resonance of a LARP.
Documentation of Nordic LARPs, especially those in the “Knutepunkt” tradition, is a given source. Do a search and see what pops up. Pervasive One of the awesome things about the MET: Vampire: The Masquerade system is that the game can be played in public without alerting the general populace that they are surrounded by an ongoing LARP. Playing at goth clubs without telling anyone (except the owners of the club) was a common way to enjoy the game in the ’90s. In recent nights, Nordic LARPs have explored this kind of “pervasive” liveaction gaming as well.
Playing a game centered around ghouls or thin-blooded vampires can be very immersive, even if played in public. Such creatures are not so different from the mortals around them, and require few rules and almost no supernatural abilities. A pervasive game could even involve unknowing bystanders, as Kindred must keep the Masquerade. The vampires in the game might be trying to maneuver normal mortals (non-players) into situations where they could “feed.” In order to ensure safety (and not freak out an unknowing populace), the Storyteller could rule that if a vampire player is alone and undisturbed with a “mortal” (non-player) for a few minutes, they are considered to have fed.
That vampire gains 3 Blood points. If the vampire is able to get into a more intimate situation with a stranger, or remain alone with that non-player for a longer period, she might gain 5 Blood points instead of 3. Is it unethical to lie to strangers? To pretend to be someone else, if you’ll never see that person again? In my personal experience, if such strangers never know they’re talking to a character, they aren’t any worse for wear (though they may think you’re nuts). That’s where the Masquerade comes in, right?
However, if someone does find out that you were fooling them, they may take offense. If any of this sounds scary or fishy to you, then don’t add these scenarios to your game. Create feeding scenes where other players provide the mortal “fodder,” and leave non-players out of it. A Storyteller can take advantage of the surrounding city as a pervasive play-space without involving non-players in the game. Choose three or four physical locations within driving (or walking) distance of each other, and allow players to move freely between them without breaking roleplay.
This trick can help the game feel urban and real, with varied but immersive locations. Workshops Nordic LARPs are intimate affairs that rely on a great deal of player trust—both in the Storyteller and in each other. Larger games incorporate theatrical exercises to help individuals grow comfortable with each other and develop working relationships as players in the overall game. Improvisational theatre exercises can provide a great start for breaking the ice in a new troupe of LARPers.
Beyond warming up the troupe’s narrative and dramatic muscles, such workshops can be educational, teaching rules and guidelines for simulation systems like Vampire: The Masquerade. Here are a few techniques and systems to use when workshopping with a LARP troupe. Power Lines Ask your players to stand in a line, organizing them from the character with the highest social status to lowest. Let them memorize the order of that line, so they are aware of the social structure. After a few minutes, have the players scatter around the room in random patterns, continuing to move about.
Have them greet other players as they pass, signaling whether that player’s character is superior or inferior in status to their own. This exercise can be used to help players remember relative ranks in a military unit, Sabbat packs, or any other in-game hierarchy. Frozen Moments This is a great way to create shared memories. Ask the players to congregate in groups of two to five. Their task is to silently position themselves in a dramatic pose, illustrating a defining moment in their characters’ shared unlives.
If character A attacked character B, while character B was holding character C hostage, the three players would pose in such a manner and hold that scene, committing it to memory. Ambient music is a great way to set the mood for such tableau. Characters might show the scene of an Embrace, a bold use of prestation, the finalization or breaking of a blood bond, a fight scene in a great war, and so on. This technique can also be a way to begin a game with high energy. Take the players into the game space and pose them as they will be at the start of the game, frozen in some dramatic moment like “the death of the previous Prince,” or “the Sabbat break into the safe house.” Add some dramatic lighting or music, and you have an evocative start to your game.
Pre-created Scenes Each player chooses one of their character’s disciplines. Divide players randomly into groups of five, and explain that these are the only Kindred targets for those powers—the five players may not use these disciplines on any other characters. These groups can take a moment to discuss how they will roleplay the use of those powers against one another, based on the characters’ interactions and discipline levels. “I have 4 dots of Potence, so if I grab you, let me lead.
Jump when you feel me push at you, and it will make me look super strong. Is that ok?” “Sure, Let’s try it out!” Or “I chose Presence. If I stare into your eyes and start whispering to you, your character might call me by his ex-wife’s name. Would that be fun for you?” Creating small scenes like these ahead of time avoids the necessity for players to throw tests, or to go out-of-character when a discipline is used. Players create reasons to confront one another in character, helping such confrontations be cooperative and fun for both players.
The collaborative nature of the LARP can be used to make the game better for everyone, encouraging them to work together to create more such prearranged and cooperative scenes. Summary The first choice you should make as a Storyteller is to decide on the story and theme of the game. This is nothing new to experienced Storytellers, and it is usually the starting point for any good LARP. Vampire: The Masquerade has inspired players and Storytellers to think about theme and mood from its beginning, setting it apart from other game franchises.
From a certain perspective, Nordic LARP is the logical endpoint of Vampire: The Masquerade’s insistence on emotional, political, cultural, and social relevance. The current game reflects the maturity of Vampire’s first edition’s teenage angst, now grown to self-reflective maturity. Inspire your players to treat the issues within the game seriously. Craft relevant tales, and make them important to your players. A story about ostracism can speak to experiences of bullying. A game about Tremere refusing to cure a blood curse proliferating among Anarchs can be an analogy for pharmaceutical companies preventing medication from reaching the third world.
Keep it relevant. Ask hard questions, and encourage your players to do the same. There is no right or wrong way to do a Nordic LARP. Storytellers should be encouraged to engage in constant experimentation. Learning about staging, techniques, costumes, rules, music, and many other possible building blocks has helped Nordic LARP evolve into a powerful form of participatory art. Our stories utilize the avant-garde, the edges where realism and imagination blur, bringing in cool, tasteful, interesting, topical, and effective stories for our players.
The constant evolution of LARP, Nordic and otherwise, makes me think we’ve seen only the beginning of this developing art form. Thinking about how our art will evolve, whether you agree or disagree with my ideas, simply takes my breath away. Keep it unreal. See you on the other side. Martin Ericsson is an Emmy-awarded writer, LARP organizer, game designer, entrepreneur, player, researcher and storyteller from Sweden. Some of his finest nights were spent in Atlanta working as a Senior Content Developer for CCP’s sorely missed multiplayer adaption of World Of Darkness.
The last time he cried for real at at a larp was playing in the “Blood and Betrayal” game at 2013’s LA He is currently dreaming about running an x-rated Vampire LARP in a castle in Eastern Europe.
Originally published in Mind’s Eye Theatre: Storyteller Secrets by By Night Studios. Presented here under Resources for chronicles and live play.