I highly recommend visiting the Nordic Larp Talks site to watch other speeches which tackle issues like educational larp, playing horror, gender in larp and more.

To whet your appetite, here’s an introductory talk given by Swedish journalist Johanna Koljonen in 2011 in Copenhagen.

Lizzie Stark takes us down the rabbit hole and into the curiouser and curiouser world of LARP and shows us a place where imagination lives and breathes. We’ve wondered what happened behind those convention doors of that ‘other game.’ Leaving Mundania shines a light on Live Action Role Playing entertainment and the imaginative people who live there. Enter if you dare … and enjoy the ride! It’s an enlightening and wondrous journey.

Once, we had a ninja wedding, because…why not? Another time, we staged an art installation of four college students chain-smoking and pounding fuzzy navels. We formed a mock rock band composed of superheros. One of my roommates, now a legit working actor, shoved my entire senior thesis down his pants during a low point in my writing process. After taking advantage of the photo opportunity, we went downstairs and burned the damn thing in a trash can.

There were I’m a Little Teapot techno dance parties, streaking in full body paint pursuant to school tradition, and relentless mocking of Freudian theory, most notably during the Harold (see below) the troupe performed for a Lit Theory class based on the suggestion “phallus.”

Nostalgia aside, I’ve had the troupe on my mind because long-form improv bears some striking similarities to jeepform (or more generally freeform?) games.

Long Form Improv

Long form improv is different from the games you may have seen on Who’s Line Is It Anyway. While traditional short-form improv involves brief skits played for laughs and utilizes frequent suggestions from the audience, a single long form improv game can take 20-40 minutes or longer, and typically derives from a single audience suggestion. During long form improv, the troupe improvises a series of scenes, as opposed to just one.

While long form improv is typically played in front of an audience for laughs, it can turn serious in a heartbeat. I remember hearing endless stories from my friends in the troupe about how the dry run of a Harold or an ASSSSCAT had turned suddenly poignant in rehearsal, how they wanted to do long form for hours, even though it wasn’t as much of a crowd-pleaser as the short games. They talked about long form improv and improv theory in the solemn tones reserved for the sacred.

The art form continues to evolve, according to my former roommate Mel, who is currently in a San Francisco based troupe. Right now, she’s says she’s performing in “2-hour full-length improvised plays, basically, single sets of storylines, sometimes funny and sometimes not, and with a lot of specific genre work.”

It feels different from traditional improv as well. She writes, “One of the interesting things I’ve learned in doing this kind of improv, which is more of the “long con” than any other kind I’ve found, is that one’s onstage decisions start to focus on not just what is going to serve that moment, but what is going to serve the story as a whole – i.e. what reactions do I (the character) need to have in this moment vs. what decisions do I (the improvisor) need to make to ensure that what happens next is going to be helpful/relevant to the larger story arc…”

The Harold and ASSSSCAT Formats

Like jeepform games, longform improv games have a clearly defined format, though of course the variations are endless. My college improv troupe trafficked in two of the most basic longform formats, the Harold and the ASSSSCAT.

Comedian Del Close – widely considered the father of long form improv — developed  the Harold for The Upright Citizen’s Brigade. In the Harold, the troupe plays a series of three or more group games, which are interspersed with a set of three discrete scenes, each of which develops as the show progresses. According to the Improv Resource Center Wiki, the basic Harold structure looks like this:

Opening
Scenes: A1, B1, C1
Group Game
Scenes: A2, B2, C2
Group Game
Scenes: A3, B3, C3

The opening could be an association game, a set of monologues, or another setup that involves the whole cast and is agreed upon in advance or on the spot. It helps generate ideas for the rest of the game. Scenes A, B, and C are two-person scenes that are only thematically related, via the suggestion that initiates the game. During each set of scenes, the actors further each of the three story lines in some way. The group games are based on the opening, but do not relate to the scenes directly.

The ASSSSCAT format derives its name from the Upright Citizen’s Brigade’s still-running ASSSSCAT show, and I put it in here mainly because it’s fun to say and my friends played it. According to the Improv Resource Center Wiki, it’s similar to the Armando form, and like the Armando, it’s a form of monologue deconstruction, in which one or more players tell a true monologue, based on the starting suggestion, and the monologues become the basis for subsequent scenes.

So What? (Some Musings)

So jeepform games and long form improv have some similarity in their prescribed structures and improvised dialogue. The biggest difference, of course, is that Harolds and Armandos are intended for an audience, although I suppose they need not be. Similarly, improv troupes don’t have a GM exactly, though often one member of the group steps out and serves as a director, deciding when each scene should end and proceed to the next.

To me, jeepform’s metatechniques — devices that a GM can use during a game to break the flow of the narrative and better develop the story — seem built into the long form improv formats. In the ASSSSCAT, for example, monologuing is written into the format. After an initial monologue, the cast plays one or more scenes, and may call the monologuist (typically a celebrity) back to the stage to deliver another monologue whenever needed.

Maybe long form improv doesn’t need metatechniques introduced on the spur of the moment because improv troupes are already full of people who have learned the basic rules of scene and character development, including the awesome rule of “yes, and…”

I’m pretty sure there’s an academic paper in there somewhere, and if it has not yet been written, I invite you to write it. Now, show of hands: who wants to larp with Amy Poehler?

The awesome sauce’em Mel, has some ideas for additional reading. She writes:

Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone, and Improvisation for the Theater 3E: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques (Drama and Performance Studies) by Viola Spolin (both are early developers of “modern” improv, 1920′s on)

Truth in Comedy: The Manual for Improvisation by Del Close et al (one of the founders of Second City – this is considered by many to be the bible of contemporary improv).

If you get more interested in other approaches to improv, Improvise.: Scene from the Inside Out by Mick Napier provides a really refreshing perspective.

Living forever gets old fast, so today we look at the question: How do you know when it is time to retire a character?

Mike Young:

When your story arc has ended.

Aaron Vanek:

When I get bored of playing it. This might be after one night, or one year.

Know the signs that it’s time, says Kate Beaman-Martinez:

It’s difficult to know when it’s time to retire a character, but there are signs. One is that you don’t have any more stories to left to tell about her. I have played the same character for almost a decade now and I am finally closing the chapter on her as PC and turning into an NPC. Its taken a long time for me  to realize that she was done and it was hard letting her float off into the sunset , but I knew that I had learned all that I could from her and it was time to move on.

Keep it fun, Geoffrey Schaller advises:

[Retire] when you’re no longer having fun playing them.  If there’s nothing new to do, to explore, to challenge you – if the act of getting into character no longer holds joy for you – it’s time to move on.  You and your character are in a relationship, and if it gets stale, it can end, like any other.  That relationship needs to be maintained, like any OOG one.

Remember that it’s OK to retire, because larps are stories, not simulations of real life, Jeramy Merritt reminds us:

There are three reasons to retire a character.  1.  The character isn’t fun to play.  If you aren’t enjoying yourself, you should be, and maybe it is just time for a change.  2.  You’ve stopped having anything to work toward.  If you’ve lost character momentum, you’ve likely lost the character.  3.  You’ve finished your story.  This is the odd one.  Most players think of their character in much the same way they think of themselves.  Let’s say the entire goal of your life has been to get married (trite I know, but stick with me).  And let us say you accomplish this goal and immediately kill yourself because, well, you did what you set out to do, not really anywhere for you to go from here.  Silly right?

That I think is the problem players have with retiring characters, they mistake the lives lead in game as simulations of real life.  While in some ways this is true, the difference between a character and you, is that you can get married and just retire that character because you’ve completed your goals.  Retirement doesn’t mean always mean death.  In the best cases it just means that the story you wanted to tell with that character is over.  Larping gives you the opportunity to tell a story, and a story isn’t the same thing as a life.

Michael Pucci says trusting your gut:

When you feel your character’s story is over, then it is time to either retire or shelve a character.  There is no one definitive time to say a character should be retired… often time it is a gut feeling that you have.  If you feel burnt out on a character you should try shelving the character, or working with the ST staff on introducing a new aspect to the characters role play.  However if you feel you have ‘lost that loving feeling’ for a character, then perhaps it is time.

Sometimes, external factors like injuries play a role. Rick McCoy:

In a campaign based setting, death can come for your character before the story is done with. In the case that this doesn’t happen, most players want to stay the duration of the campaign. The story is not done, after all. But sometimes, there is a want, even a need for a change…You are the fighter, the tank, the go get em’ combat monkey. But you recently threw your hip out at the last game, and the amount of injuries you’ve sustained (hell, you’ve been this a while) is substantial. You are no longer cutting it. Time for a change – but the character is too proud to back down…maybe one last glorious charge at the next over-nighter, and start working with the Plot team for a new character concept that won’t push your physical limitations as much?

You are the the archeologist – working for a mercenary outfit hasn’t been so bad. In your trips across the dark areas of Africa, and the ancient rain forests of South America, you’ve been able to see much that your colleagues back home are furiously envious of. But in all the escapades you’ve been in, when the worse that can go wrong does – you’ve always been so amazed at the gunmen in the group. You even started to ask one of them to train you in using his handgun, and you are quite good at it. But your character concept is optimized for other skills, and so your real world skills offer little benefit. Now the inventor of the group – he could surely do your job?.. and the last game the party was almost wiped by large apes that came from no where…maybe you’ll talk to the storyteller of how you could retire and bring in a new sharpshooter…

Retiring a character doesn’t mean saying goodbye for every, Sarah Lynne Bowman says:

You’ve asked probably one of the most difficult questions for Campaign-style play! Sometimes, when I think a character has run his/her course, hit a rut, or is no longer interesting, the character evolves in a way that completely surprises me and gets a second wind. I find that my characters are reflections of fragments of my personality, so even if a character has been “retired” for several years, they may resurface in other games with new insight, direction, or growth.

Endings are less important for me than moments within the game over the course of the character’s tenure. Other players feel the need for their characters to have a clear and decisive end before they can move on, either as “in retirement” or through a “good death” — in other words, a meaningful and fulfilling ending to their life. Even when my characters “end,” they still remain part of me, as if they were stuck in a sort of suspended animation, so they tend to pop back up in different times and places. This phenomenon is especially common since I’ve been a Storyteller regularly; so many personalities – both PC and NPC — have evolved through my game play that they emerge at surprising points in time.

Make your death meaningful, suggests J. Tuomas Harviainen:

In Nordic larps, we rarely play to win, so if it’s a dramatically suitable moment and won’t rob me of too much playing time, the character can “retire” by dying in a manner that contributes to the game. I very rarely play in campaign games these days, so I don’t encounter the need to actually retire a character that often. In such cases I have asked myself “would it be logical for this person to stay in this place? and if the answer was a definite no, I have retired that character, while he or she has in-game left town.

Read more first-timers’ guides here at LizzieStark.com.

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Kate Beaman-Martinez  has been acting since she was 11 and started gaming at 17. She cut her teeth on White Wolf’s Werewolf: The Apocalypse and naturally got up when there was a heated debate on the proper uses of torture in her weekly table top group. Shortly thereafter she joined The Avatar System and hasn’t looked back. Through larping, she has found her partners, and moved to New York. Kate is currently a full time student and the Executive Assistant for Double Exposure, Inc.

Sarah Lynne Bowman received her PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2008. McFarland press published her dissertation in 2010 under the title The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity. Her current research focuses upon understanding social conflict within role-playing communities and applying Jungian theory to the phenomenon of character immersion.

J. Tuomas Harviainen comes from Finland, and is one of those pesky  professional larp researchers. In addition to studying larps, he also designs them. His mini-larps have so far been run in at least 14 countires and translated to seven languages.

Rick McCoy began larping in 1989, and works as an electrician by day and a larp advocate by night. Over the course of his career, he has organized many games, conventions, and larp organizations. He currently serves as the president of LARP Alliance, which he co-founded, and has been involved in many media promotions of the hobby, including work in an advisory capacity for the filmmakers of Role Models and the forthcoming Knights of Badassdom. He lives in Southern California.

Jeramy Merritt is a long-time larper, first-time caller. He is the creator of Doomsday, a sci-fi larp.

Michael Pucci is the CEO of Eschaton Media and the creator of multiple larps, tabletop books, scripts and gaming-related media.  He has more than twenty years experience storytelling for larps, tabletops, and convention games, and spent five years in the business side of the gaming industry. He proudly holds the title of ‘Zombie Lord‘ while looking for more inventive approaches to modernize gaming.

Geoffrey Schaller is a gaming gypsy, having wandered into and out of tabletop RPGs, Collectable Card Games, Miniatures, larp (WoD, boffer, and other), Board Games, MMOs, and countless other forms of gaming, as a player, play tester, demo-runner, author, and staff member.  He still dabbles in all of them when he gets the chance. He is the Technical Director of Double Exposure, Inc.

Aaron Vanek has been playing, designing, running, and thinking about larps for 25 years. His larp publications include the illustrated essay “Cooler Than You Think: Understanding Live Action Role Playing“; “The Non-United Larp States of America“ in the Talk Knutepunkt 2011 book, “Predictions for Larp” in Journeys to Another World, the Wyrd Con book, and the blueprint for “Rock Band Murder Mystery” in the Do Knutepunkt 2011 book. He hopes for at least another 25 years of larp.

Mike Young has been writing live roleplaying games for over 20 years.  His award-winning larps have been run across the world, and many of them are available for free download at his website.

He calls the book, “the most descriptive, all-encompassing book about larp and larpers on the market, and highly recommendable to anyone interested on the subject.”

Read the rest of the review in all its thoughtful glory.

Leaving Mundania is available for pre-order from Amazon, Powell’s, and Barnes & Noble.

The Incredible Case of the PI Moms

You might also check out Derek Rawlings’s (Vancouver-based?) blog, drLARP, devoted to “embiggening” the hobby. He’s got posts giving advice to players and storytellers on a variety of topics, from how to strategically use NPCs as an organizer, to how to have fun playing a low-level character.

I can’t help but notice a similar dynamic on my local larp scene. It’s no secret that larp tends to skew male, at least in the New Jersey area, though I’ve seen changes in gender balance for the better during the three years I’ve spent watching the scene.

Although more women than ever are attending games, I noticed that a proportionally smaller number of the women take on leadership roles in game or out of game. While there are wonderful women GMs and storytellers on the scene, generally, men predominate. Often, when I see women on GM teams they’re doing traditional lady work (read: often-thankless organizational jobs behind the scenes)  – gathering props, making player databases and other clerical work, booking venues, etc — not the high-profile creative work of inventing stories and running plots. Maybe this is a lag problem — a lot of women are new to the scene, and perhaps want to familiarize themselves with it before stepping up. Maybe the women on the scene are happy with the status quo. But maybe encouraging more women to run games would help the balance too.

I don’t think that anyone has created this imbalance with malice and forethought; the gaming community is far from the only part of our culture with skewed gender ratios. But like other skewed areas of our culture — politics, science, etc — the gaming community has a lot to gain from including more women. And the imbalance isn’t going to change itself. According to my physicist husband, whom I trust on matters like this (because SCIENCE!), polarized systems in nature stay polarized unless you put in work to change the balance. In other words, unless people actively try to get women more involved in running and designing games, inertia will prevail.

Here are some strategies for changing that imbalance: seek out and mentor women GMs and game designers. Gently encourage your female friends to step out of their comfort zones and start running games. Publicly thank women who do clerical work for your game. Think twice about assigning clerical work to women. Support women who do run and design games. Invite women to your games specifically and listen to their suggestions and concerns.

I think larp is a beautiful medium for telling stories, and I think women have a lot to add to this conversation. Where one woman goes, many women follow, and that’s good for everyone.

Watch this space in the coming months for some link love aimed at lady gamers. I’m sure there are some other cool venues for women gamers and game designers out there, but for starters, check out these Beautiful Brains Women in Gaming Chats or RPGirl Zine. There’s also the Facebook group The Larpettes. Know of more lady-gamer spaces? Let me know in the comments.

I know I’ll be looking forward to lovely new dead-tree issues, as well as snappy blog posts on the “now” of larp.

Thank you, Denmark, just…thank you.

Thanks to Markus/Nathan for the tip!

Since we’ve already looked at how to create a fun larp character, today, we look at the question: How can a player develop his or her character during a larp?

Get in touch with your character’s flaws, says Geoffrey Schaller:

In a campaign, the best approach to developing your character is to start the game with them being incomplete.  If you’ve already determined everything about them, there’s no where left for them to go, no room to grow or change.  Start your character young and flawed, and resist the urge to resolve those flaws too quickly, or you will find the character is no longer fun to play.

For a one-shot, it’s harder, as what you are handed to work with, and the constraints in which you do it, are much more limited.  Look at the session as a whole, and determine the theme or point of the game, and let that be your guide.

In-game failure is a virtue, Michael Pucci thinks:

Character development relies heavily on being aware of the world around you, and allowing it to affect your character emotionally and mentally. Allow your character to grow friendships and enemies, to win, and most importantly, to fail.  Some of the best stories come from a character failing and dealing with picking themselves back up off the ground.  Don’t be afraid to show a full range of emotions while playing so that your character can develop his or her own emotions that exist outside of yours.  It is easy to act like nothing bothers the ‘ultra heroic character’ however it takes true role playing skill to actually show weakness, character flaws, and negative personality quirks.

Jeramy Merritt says your character should want something:

Goals.  Find something you want to do as your character, and work toward it.  Whether you succeed or fail matters little, so long as you have something that keeps you going, it will inform much of how you play your character.

Consider the overall dramatic arc of your character, and take metagame steps to achieve it, Anna Westerling advises:

I usually strive after some kind of dramatic curve for my character. A beginning, some conflict and then a solution about how the character will move on. To achieve this, meet with the other players before the larp and plan what you are going to do and what conflicts will happen. Of course this sometimes doesn’t happen, because you get pulled into the larp, but you can also go off-game with a few fellow players to check up on each other. How are we doing, are we achieving our story, and can we help each other? This so no one is left behind, and ends up feeling that they didn’t get a good larp. Towards the end of the larp I also usually try to find an ending  for my character, to figure out how s/he will move on after the larp is over.

Practice good improv (say “Yes and…”) says Mike Young:

Use the improv theater techniques of listening and building.  That is, pay attention to what is going on in the world around you and then allow your character to grow by reacting to it.

Push yourself beyond your comfort zone, suggests Kate Beaman-Martinez:

Obviously what I play is greatly affected by setting. I generally poke around the rule book to see whats there and find a combo that fits. Over the years I’ve figured out where I land (generally a good person who likes to help others) and I try to push the envelope on my comfort zones.

Make sure you’ve done your prep, say Aaron Vanek and Sarah Bowman. Sarah Bowman:

Two things are crucial for me when preparing a character for a larp, either one-shots or Campaign-style: backstory and costuming. Once the character enters the game world, however, anything goes. The character changes and evolves as a result of interactions within the game, sometimes dramatically. Interactions with other players and with the game universe forces that sort of change, providing the stimulus for actions that may or may not have been built into the original character concept.

Aaron Vanek:

I do my best to make a three-dimensional character that has strengths and weaknesses, flaws and virtues. I try to always give my stereotypical good guy characters an unpleasant quality, and my stereotypical villains something admirable. The characters I want play, fun or not, should have three parts to them:

• a background history that explains where they came from, i.e., the events that occurred in their life (birth, family, friends, education, occupations, and traumatic or beneficial incidents)
• a personality that shaped and was shaped by that background and events. It’s one thing to say “My parents were killed by barbarians before my eyes” and another to say “I spent the rest of my life honing my combat skills to exact revenge” and another to say “I dedicated my life to the dark arts to bring back my parents and all the others the barbarians have slain to take their revenge on them” or “I used any means necessary to rise to the top of army command and now will lead my forces against the barbarians” or, “I retreated from the world and stole what i needed to survive. I trust no one and make no friends or allegiances for fear anyone I really care about will be taken away from me leaving me with that devastating pain I felt years ago.”
• finally, this character needs to have concrete goals that motivates them and gives a thru-line to hook the larping to.

My road trip analogy is:

• a character’s background is the make and model of the car
• the goals or motivation is where the car is going, the destination
• the personality is how you drive to that destination–fast, slow, nonstop, visiting detours, comfortably, stylishly, or belching poison behind you, hazardous to anyone behind you?

During the larp itself, developing my character isn’t my goal, acting and reacting as the character to what is presented is my goal. If that leads to character growth, great. If not–but I feel that I stayed true to the character–that’s fine.

 J. Tuomas Harviainen and Rick McCoy remind us that many character developments happen naturally. J. Tuomas Harviainen:

The character is, without actual play, just empty words, and idea on paper. It starts naturally developing as soon as it’s brought into play (in a pre-game workshop, or the actual game), through interaction with other characters and the game world. So when I play, I add bits and pieces of what I encounter into the “facts” of that character. The only rule I follow, really, is that nothing I add should contradict what was originally given to me by the organizers as facts about that character.

Rick McCoy:

Most characters will have a chance to evolve and develop during a campaign game. It’s natural. As the story progresses, your character’s experiences accrue. Even if you are just a writer that comes out every game, and don’t interact much with anyone, you would be noticing everything around you, and the evolution of the story from event to event will be the backdrop for how your character reacts to the game environment.

Read more first-timers’ guides here at LizzieStark.com.

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Kate Beaman-Martinez  has been acting since she was 11 and started gaming at 17. She cut her teeth on White Wolf’s Werewolf: The Apocalypse and naturally got up when there was a heated debate on the proper uses of torture in her weekly table top group. Shortly thereafter she joined The Avatar System and hasn’t looked back. Through larping, she has found her partners, and moved to New York. Kate is currently a full time student and the Executive Assistant for Double Exposure, Inc.

Sarah Lynne Bowman received her PhD from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2008. McFarland press published her dissertation in 2010 under the title The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity. Her current research focuses upon understanding social conflict within role-playing communities and applying Jungian theory to the phenomenon of character immersion.

J. Tuomas Harviainen comes from Finland, and is one of those pesky  professional larp researchers. In addition to studying larps, he also designs them. His mini-larps have so far been run in at least 14 countires and translated to seven languages.

Rick McCoy began larping in 1989, and works as an electrician by day and a larp advocate by night. Over the course of his career, he has organized many games, conventions, and larp organizations. He currently serves as the president of LARP Alliance, which he co-founded, and has been involved in many media promotions of the hobby, including work in an advisory capacity for the filmmakers of Role Models and the forthcoming Knights of Badassdom. He lives in Southern California.

Jeramy Merritt is a long-time larper, first-time caller. He is the creator of Doomsday, a sci-fi larp.

Michael Pucci is the CEO of Eschaton Media and the creator of multiple larps, tabletop books, scripts and gaming-related media.  He has more than twenty years experience storytelling for larps, tabletops, and convention games, and spent five years in the business side of the gaming industry. He proudly holds the title of ‘Zombie Lord‘ while looking for more inventive approaches to modernize gaming.

Geoffrey Schaller is a gaming gypsy, having wandered into and out of tabletop RPGs, Collectable Card Games, Miniatures, larp (WoD, boffer, and other), Board Games, MMOs, and countless other forms of gaming, as a player, play tester, demo-runner, author, and staff member.  He still dabbles in all of them when he gets the chance. He is the Technical Director of Double Exposure, Inc.

Aaron Vanek has been playing, designing, running, and thinking about larps for 25 years. His larp publications include the illustrated essay “Cooler Than You Think: Understanding Live Action Role Playing“; “The Non-United Larp States of America“ in the Talk Knutepunkt 2011 book, “Predictions for Larp” in Journeys to Another World, the Wyrd Con book, and the blueprint for “Rock Band Murder Mystery” in the Do Knutepunkt 2011 book. He hopes for at least another 25 years of larp.

Anna Westerling is a larper, larp-producer and role-player of the Scandinavian larp scene. She has organized larps as A nice Evening with the Family, and produced Knutpunkt and the bookNordic Larp.

Mike Young has been writing live roleplaying games for over 20 years.  His award-winning larps have been run across the world, and many of them are available for free download at his website.