Polyfem Transformed

Beloved Jakob

2007-11-14T23:05:00.001+01:00

I have a small game for you. Beloved Jakob is what I call a conversational game. It's for two players and no GM. The game consists of three pdf files. Both players read the short introduction file. Then the players divide the two player files between them, read their character file and engage in a conversation. This conversation is the game.

Beloved Jakob is a very small game about goodhearted people, about the banality of happiness and what there is to be found in the space between them. It is also about Jakob, the beloved.

I wrote it in my Turkish exile, to be played over phone, but it can as well be played by two players in a room. The game is short and should normally be finished in less than one hour. It should also be noted that not only does the game treat adult subject matters, the issues of the characters are quite heavy even for the strong of mind. Do not read or play if you are sensitive or really don't understand why roleplaying should be about anything else than fun action.

Beloved Jakob exists in English as well as in Swedish. The pdfs which constitute the two versions can be found from the following links:

Beloved Jakob: Introduction, player text one (Mia), player text two (Lars).

Älskade Jakob: Introduktion, spelartext ett (Mia), spelartext två (Lars).

People I want to thank

Even for a very small game like this there are people to send thanks to. Having friends make things easier in general and much easier when they help you. So thanks Anna Hansson for playtest and feedback, thanks to Jonas Ferry for proofreading both the Swedish and English version and for a lot of proposed changes (of which I agreed with almost all) and Kristoffer Sjöö for proofreading the Swedish version.

Prosopopeia

2006-08-26T23:48:00.000+02:00

The New Big Thing in Swedish larp is Prosopepeia: Momentum. (Homepages here and here) This is the second installment, I won't talk anything about the first in the trilogy, but this years Knutpunkt book contains a long article about it. Let's just say that they are both based on the same concept.

First, Prosopepeia: Momentum is a research project as well as a larp. There are people who do funded research on pervasive gaming, which also happen to be right in the focal point of the Swedish larp community.

There are several important facts that put Prosopopeia apart from earlier larps. Most of these things have been tried out, but never in anything close to this scale.

One basic idea seem to be that nothing during the game should betray it as a game. Even in game the research organization SICS is involved in creating the game. The game exist in game.
You play yourself and your own reality is a part of the game. The game goes on for one month! During this time you should live your normal life as well as taking part in the game. The game is constructed in such a way that you always have the possibility of stepping out the game to take care of your life.
To solve number 2. above the role you play is shaped in a rather unusual fashion. During the month of the game you get occassionally obsessed by a deceased spirit, who tries to make you act according to its will. When you are not obsessed (always finally up to the player herself) you can act as yourself. But it's definitely the player who is obsessed by the spirit, so the players own life become directly a part of the game.
One important part of the game is that play will not only occur between players, (what we in Swedish call skarplajv) but also between a single player and people in town, who are not players. The players are encouraged to play while obsessed with strangers, family member or the people you meet in the supermarket. But since the the game events also in all senses happen to the player also all actions made by the player when not obsessed are in a way game play

I think these points should be enough for some controversy. The controversy has sofar been surprisingly small here, probably due to that these questions have already been discussed here. To add to it all the project is extremely expensive and (isn't everything these days) funded by a European Union project.

If I heard of anything like this from outside of the Nordic countries I would have been very, very surprised. Is this a sane presupposition?

The New Black: Roleplaying over internet

2006-08-17T00:18:00.000+02:00

You get old, you get ideas, you get a job, you find new people you want to live with, you start hating your state, you get deported or even married.

All theses things are stuff that keep you away from roleplaying as you get older and life become more complex, but still more your own. I moved to Turkey, but can't roleplay in Turkish. Not good. But then: roleplaying over internet? Fullfilling? Feasible?

Two hings made me think of this right now:

Per von Fischer writes about an IRC version of Sorcerer on his blog Mørke Steder.
I did it myself earlier today.

Trials and tribulations of internet roleplaying

Ars Magica we play. Since sometimes last spring we have been playing an Ars Magica campaign through a chat client. We not used a regular client, instead the groups geeky genius and general lightbringer Kristoffer made a quite ambitious client for online Ars Magica play. I won't explain you its workings here, but the main idea is that each player has an own channel of text. The text in these channels is removed rather quickly, while the more important stuff is cut by the GM and copied into the ongoing story text flow. At first I didn't think I would enjoy this way of play, but it turned out to work fine. Hey, I'm not the genius, we havee other people for that. In addition the client has support for keeping and editing character sheets and several other things.

But there are problems. As one commenter noted on Pers game, mentioned above, the game often gets slow and even if the play is interesting it's easy to loos ones concentration. At least for me. Especially slowness as been evident almost all the time during this campaign. (The fact that one of us decided to start a polical career and paint his face all over his city instead of playing is of course also a problem).

As I wrote about in the ancient past my interest in nowadays in roleplaying is towards freeform and non-fantasy larp and after a personal doctoring thread at Ben Lehmans old blog (as opposed to his new) I was given the simulationist diagnosis. But I do feel that this way of play really fit much better with a Story Now goals. My insight into Story Now and narrativism is very limited, but I would definitely say that way are geared towards that kind of thinking by the channel of communication itself.

There is more to it than I will go into now. But one thing is the text itself, which makes it easier to detach from the characters to conentrate on creating story. Also, you have more limited time (play is slow) and since you lack the possibility of playing out scenes it just makes sense to spend energy on the bare bones of the story and discuss it in advance with other players.

Orpheus we play. Since several years we have an ongoing Orpheus campaign (you know that White Wolf game in a limited series of six books). During the last two years we have been spread out over an impressively large area. We are now discussing play over internet. Today me and Anna went ahead of the other players (and the GM!) and played out a couple of scenes over Skype.

I would call this Phone larp. Since it is. Before play we made up the external setting of two phonecalls that would be separated by one week and also noted some things about what we might talk about and which secrets we would tell the other (without telling the actual content of the secret). Then we played out the calls, wholeheartedly ingame of course. Between calls we had a short discussion.

The plot is as follows: my character suddenly disappeared from his girlfriend (Annas character) and after three days he finally calls her (first call). He gives a very bad explanation (a part of it being, "Do you remember this girl I have told you about? I met her again and we went to Seattle.") and then doesn't call again. A week later (second call) she has just almost, almost got killed, the world actually seems to be collapsing and she and everyone she knows are hiding from tens of thousands of entities in the streets of New York wanting to kill them more than almost anything else. Also, she just realized she is pregnant. And my character hasn't been adopted by her native American tribe yet. The horror.

So now their worst problem is how to get him adopted. Human psyches are funny things. Especially when they are not your own.

I would love other people experiences about all types of distant roleplaying.

Meanwhile in the Nordic scen

2006-05-25T00:00:00.000+02:00

Well, Im in Turkey, but occassionally looking at what's happening at home. I can complain for hours that we have to few larps in Sweden. But I'm stupid. There could be more really interesting stuff, sure. But there are good stuff and my only problem is that I'm not there to take part of it.

Two things struck me recently. First we have the enormous project Dragonbane. A friend of mine just told me that directly after finishing his mater thesis he will go to Finland to help building the dragon during most of the summer. Please follow that link, if you haven't seen it. (The game will be in Sweden, but the dragon is built in Finland.)

Secondly, the book from the recent Knutpunkt gathering (annual nordic larp meeting) in Sweden.

Neither of these things are exactly my cup of tea, but they are still amazing things that happens in my hobby and I realized that I'm excited about it. I will definitely read most of the book. Some of it is definitely interesting stuff. But for me the most interesting that is happening in the Swedish larp-scene is actually Fabel. I have written about them earlier. At the moment I'm pissed that I can't join my friends on their game Vändpunkter.

On the other hand, tomorrow I will walk with the people I work with along the coast of the black sea for several hours and then eat and drink some rakı. I have lived like a kilometer from the Black Sea for several months and I have yet to go there. But tomorrow it is! Fuck roleplaying.

On immersion (popular these days)

2005-11-28T22:06:00.000+01:00

I mentioned Gabriel in the last post and I will give you a quick and dirty translation of a fun passage from a blog post by Gabriel, about his interpretation of Istanbul. (Please note, dear readers, that my translation is slightly simplified compared with the original.)

For roleplayer and larpers immersion is a dear theme. But it's not only obscure subcultures that engage in honest and tiring games of imagination. Right now a global immersion practice is going on all over the world.

I wake startled, by a drum solo right outside my window. Turn on my cell phone. It's four in the morning. I listen to the drums and soon someone starts singing loudly. It goes on for a couple of minutes. I am surprised that noone stop the lunatic, but soon I fall asleep again. In the morning I ask Zeynep what was going on. It's Ramadan, the month-long moslem fast that goes on from dawn to sun down. During the day people don't eat and that's the reason to why they have to be woken up before dawn to have something to eat to be able to stand the coming day. Ramadan is a way of getting closer to god (imagine the presence of god), but it's also a way to understand how poor and starving people are leading their lifes. Even the most hardcore immersionist have to be impressed by this level of ambition.

Back again. Once more.

2005-11-28T21:19:00.000+01:00

I'm not a very trustworthy man

This is my third, now-I'm-finally-back-text on this blog this semester. I hope it's true this time. Most of my world has been about moving to Istanbul, understanding my new job and other things related. Of course I have also started a new blog, İstanbul, Europa (in Swedish) about this new world that surrounds me.

I haven't been thinking this little about roleplaying in a lot of years. It might even be good for me to have a period like that, who knows. But now I am getting kind of used to life here in Istanbul and all these thoughts about the noble art of roleplaying have started invade my brain again. They have been quite helped by people that I have been in contact with lately. The larping Turk Alper Acik is one. Martin Svahn of Frispel fame is one. Gabriel is a third.

How I came to talk about roleplaying and learned to stop worry

I have only met one Swede since I got here. He is another. I have never met Gabriel Widing before, only heard about, like I know the names of most Swedish people who have somewhat similar taste in larps as me. We had a quite interesting conversation when we met down in Taksim. Regarding larping his main point was that to be interesting, to give something more than other types roleplaying already do larps have to give unusual experiences that aren't intellectual, but physical. He want games that puts into your muscles and flesh the reminscences of an experience, instead of in your brain (like the famous Norwegian game Europa or the Swedish Mellan Himmel och Hav).

I see now that I could say a lot about this, I won't, but I hope that I can return to that later.

This little corner

I probably won't write very much here for the time being; I don't know any roleplayer
here. But I will try to write something every week, at least.

And all roleplayer playing in Swedish or English, if you come close to Istanbul and feel that special emptiness in your belly that always indicates lack of some good old Nordic roleplaying. Or something else. Well, make contact. I'll be here for a while.

Swedish Freeform and the Forge

2005-09-03T22:55:00.000+02:00

It struck me

One thing that has struck me many times is the similarities between the Swedish/Danish brand of freeform (admittedly the Danes seem to have developed things further than we up here, but we will do as the Japanese in the industrial revolution, trust me) and the narrative games from Forge-associated creators.

Even more frequently the differences have been on my mind. The differences are very obvious, but that makes the similarities even more interesting. Hang on I will get back to this in a couple of paragraphs.

There is this wiki

A couple of months ago Martin Svahn from FriSpel started a wiki about friform, the Swedish/Danish style of freeform roleplaying. Very recently debates have started to abound there, although still by a quite small number of people. A little while ago Olle Jonsson started a review section and started by asking for reviews of Jason Morningstars game The Shab al-Hiri-Roach. The game is obviously written in the Forge-tradition and was created for the Iron Game Chef competition of this year. An evidence of it's worth in those circles is what the big man himself, Ron Edwards has to say about it.

When Olle started the review page (in Swedish) he presented the game as a scenario and wrote that in Game Chef all scenarios have to fullfill certain criterias. What kind of comments this would sparkel wasn't very hard to figure out. Role playing discussion is a very reliable black box. "This game is not a scenario and thusly not friform" is a given tagline for the opposition.

Friform and everything about it

Firstly, what is this friform? As always there exists no good definition. Often the word (as freeform) is used about games where simply no dice or traditional game mechanics are used (I guess traditonal is a keyword here). Most people who actually dabble with these things beg to differ. This has of course been discussed at the mentioned forum (here, actually). The people at the forum represents quite different practices, but the wording that seems to please most people simply states that friform games are role playing games where the rules are constructed to fit the scenario at hand. An additon to this tells that dice could very well be used, if this for some reason is of great of importance to the story at hand.

Right, that is a loose definition, has there ever been one. But it's to my liking. To make you (I always picture myself writing to American gamers, although most of my readers probably are Swedes with more or less my own views) understand the practice of friform I will tell you a few more things.

We talk about scenarios rather than games. A scenario consists of a number of (always pre-created) characters and often a number of more or less pre-determined events or scenes. In many cases these scenes are quite well scripted. Some brands make use of a very physical style of play, where you really play with your whole body and never sit at a table, unless your characters do so. Your tool in this case is an empty room. Other brands have a more traditional table-top setup with a table between players, ontop of which handouts can be read during the game.

In most cases you are supposed to play one scenario only once. Vi Åker Jeep claim that their scenarios are good for playing several times. I believe them. It depends all on where in the game the interest is supposed to be.

Finally: Forge and freeform

I promised similarities. Well. The whole tagline for the Forge has been "Rules does matter", which should be interpreted as that rules should be made to fit the story and theme at hand. If you want to talk about war and forfeit; make rules about this. If your interest is domesticating animals; do rules describing this. All this is said much better by Ben Lehman in his most recent post. (Reading this is really a very good way to understand the Forge way of games.)

This way of thinking has resulted in very specialized games, (not all games emanating from the Forge are like this, but a great deal of them) where big parts of the game flow is predetermined. The characters are player-created, (in oppositon to friform) but the sort of questions asked to players and many of the the situations they are put in during play are detirmined by the game text (in opposition to most traditional table top games).

The play of The Shab al-Hiri-Roach is made up by a number of predetermined scenes, like Chancellor’s wine and cheese social and Homecoming football game, which is really more than enough to make it work as a scenario in friform. Around this you have mechanics to help to describe the characters struggle with evil roaches and the quest of gettin renown in science.

Just a little more

My usual view of all this (which I haven't really been addressing above, if someone ask I might do just that) is that friform and this type of narrativistic game have identfied many of the same problems in table top role playing, but have solved these issues very differently. In practical play friform and typical narrativistic play are usually further from each other than either is from ordinary table top. At least according to my experience and understanding.

It should be mentioned that the recent and on this blog already mentioned article shortly mentions these similarities (even if it doesn't say, I imagine the article to be written mostly by Tobias Wrigstad and Olle Jonsson).

BTW the game itself really intrigues me, although I have to admit I am seldom able to enjoy this typ of game mechanics. But it can happen. I would love to play the game, especially the theme with getting renown in the academic world has been very dear to me since I had some (admittedly small) experience of that last year. Friends, it's ugly.

Things to read

2005-09-02T00:29:00.000+02:00

I have been away from this blog for a while, but I hope to start regular writing again from now on. As you can see below I have been trying to change the appearence of the blog. Mainly I thought a three column design with a floating middle part would be nice. But I just haven't been able to make it work.

Several of the versions of code I've tried have worked...almost. Everything has been looking fine, except for a severe mutilation in the first post. Some versions has worked very nicely locally, but been very skewed when putting them into Blogger. The conclusion is that I don't posses the CSS skill to create this for the Blogger envrionment. For now I have given up that.

Now it all looks like it did before and I'm back att producing text.

Playing with mother in law

Other people have been writing, though. Over at Yudhishthira's Dice Bradley "Brand" Robins gives it up on playing HeroQuest with his Mother in law in yet two posts. We are eagerily awaiting the finishing one. There are some good advice in there. Most of all it shows that non-gamers often are better role players than ourselves. It might be sad to hear. But that's how it is.

Ars Amandi

Jonas at writes about Ars Armandi experimentation. It's a method for simulation of sex in larps. Just so you don't think anything else: it's actually used, albeit seldom, here and quite well known. Also read the comments over at anyway.

Freeform

The Swedish freeform group Vi åker jeep (We go by Jeep) has revised their text about their form of role play. I really enjoy their text at dict.jeepen.org and I would definitely recommend anyone interested in rpg to take a look at it.

Swedish larps

What was supposed to be the biggest larp of this year will most likely be the biggest of next year. Dragonbane has been moved from 2005 Estonia to 2006 Sweden. The houses are being built as I write this. Interacting Arts has a few pictures of the houses to be, although these pictures should be quite old by now.

I was supposed to go to Moira, but my inability to live my life as efficiently as I should forced me to give my role to my friend Fredrik von Post less than two weeks before the event itself. It felt really terrible to do this and I will really try to avoid that to happen again. There are pictures available. It seems like people really enjoyed the larp. By the way, the Ars Amandi method was used there.

Ugly me

2005-08-02T01:15:00.000+02:00

I'm doing som experiments with the blog. Things might look ugly for a few days.

The current layout works in Explorer, but not inf Firefox. I will change to something else in a while, maybe a piuxel fixed verison. My CSS ability is not very great, obviously.

Scraps, pictures

2005-08-01T01:41:00.000+02:00

Helena made a very nice page of photos from the lajv that told about in the last post. She is talented with that stuff.

Yesterday I was over at Jonas Barkås apartment and played a game of Illuminati. I never write about boardgames and such here, since it would feel like writing about what food I eat everyday (mostly pasta and salmon these days, by the way). But since I won, I will at least link to Jonas' post including a quite nice picture of us in silly hats. Jonas and me agreed that he really looks like one would imagine Abdul Al-Hazred to look like.

One of the more sympathetic pages about role playing is Places to go, People to be. I have read it to and fro for a couple of years. They are quite far from my main interest in role playing, but since they simply are good this doesn't matter too much. The amount of people who read my text, but haven't read their are probably very few, if you are one of those; check them out. And the name is great. I will start to believe in reincarnation just to be able to steal it my next life. (Because in that life I wouldn't be involved in rpg:s at all and thus noone would suspect me.) It's that great.

Systrarna Cederschiöld

2005-07-29T20:42:00.000+02:00

Introductory notes about men and their scenes

Only a few months ago Jonas K. over at Jonas dagar turned down invitations both to lajv-(larp) and friform games just by saying he didn't like that type of play, admitting membership in the sprawling indie scene. Discussions continued after that in the same manner as in the last couple of years. Maybe the pace was a bit faster now, discussions took place at our and others blogs instead of at parties and in private forums. The audience (mostly silent and maybe imagined) makes you erase some of the really crappy things you want to write in the heat of discussion. The simple insights that bridged the gap was the following two things:

Clarity. Nothing is more important than clarity of appropriate style of play in a certain game. Otherwise you put both friendship and fun at great risk.
What kind of rewards you can expect to get from a game is very strongly dependent on the style of play. Players has to be aware of this and follow this.

I guess something like this has been invading Jonas head. Because a while ago he GM:ed a typical Swedish friform game (I have sadly not finished my text about it. Before I do that you have to do with his own.) and now he and Helena Ferry wrote a lajv. Seven characters, the writers included, played this little family tragedy last Wednesday in Jonas' and Helenas' apartment.

The game

Once there were four sisters Cederschiöld. But during twelve years there have been only three. The parents forbade anyone to mention the fourth in their presence. She should be forgotten. At 28 years of age Marianne feels it to be time to reconnect with her sisters and she invites them all to her apartment in a not too flashy neighbourhood outside of Göteborg.

The lajv began with a huge clash when the three sisters descended from high society to the world of Marianne and Roger (played by Helena Ferry and Jonas Karlsson, respectively). The steepest fall was the one experienced by the oldest sister Wictoria (played by Ingela Vretblad) and her husband Ernst Hjelmsäther (played by me). Wictoria hade married Ernst mainly to get a name higher up in the noble hierarchy.

Alice (played by Julia Klingvall) was the only sister with a traditional career, working as an achitect. Her husband Konrad (played by Jonas Liljenfeldt) leads a computer company, but seems to have different views on life than his wife.

Charlotta (played by Elisabeth Öberg) had made a somewhat unusual choice in life by living as a not very well paid artist. Neither Alice nor Wictoria are comfortably with this or that she seem to be satisfied with being single.

The above is a scetch of the starting point for the game. Everyone played just beautifully and each of the seven characters had an interesting part in the play. Jonas and Helena had on beforehand been very clear on what style of play they wanted. Accept other players ideas, don't block, be creative. In contrary to the common idea of creating a story line they had actively tried to rid their texts from story arc; wanting this to be created by the players during play.

I really enjoyed it, but had of course a few comments. Two things are of interest for in the context of this text.

I think it would have been good with one or two common memories for the sisters. This isn't necessary, since the whole style of play was inviting to determing such things during play. But the sisters had very little discussion about their common past and I think it would be good to put some stress on that part.
The game became somewhat static. Quite soon we found a role for each character and kept it there for the remainder of the game. I think very small measures could be used to create somewhat more drama. During almost all of the game we sat around the table. I think more things would have happened if just hosts had asked us to move to the sofa or move around freely with coffee. I personally was definitely lacking possibilities of talking to other characters alone.

It was great fun. I know that Jonas plan to put the whole game somewhere close to his blog, probably after a tiny bit of rewriting. Read it. Play it.

A coincidence in addition

Playing my characters wife was Ingela Vretblad. As it turns out she also visited Mellanrummet (see earlier post) and even played one of the four satanists. It was indeed very interesting to compare out different experiences and different takes on playing satanists in night clothes.

Edit

Now read more sides of the story. Choose if you want to hear the gospel according to Jonas or Helena (Helenas text is in Swedish).

Kejsartemplet

2005-07-26T13:44:00.000+02:00

The most talked about Swedish larp of this year, Kejsartemplet (The emperor Temple) has ended. And with a tremendous success as it seems. Frenzing players at G-punkt talk about that the impossible has been done and some people are convinced that they will never again see a larp as good. Surely some bad critique will surface, but it seems to be safe to say that the larp was an unusual success.

I wasn't there - and I didn't even consider it since joining a traditional fantasy larp would force me to do a lot of work that I'm not really into - and can't say too much about what was going on. As far as I know it was a bit unusual in that they let humour be part of the world building and the scenario. As subtitle they used the quite remarkable statement Everyone can be a priest ("Vem som helst kan bli präst"). This describes the main story arc; a new religion is to be constructed in the country. There will be a competition for the creation of a new religion with new rituals. (Could that easily be done in the US in a larp with four hundred players? According to what I have heard about American larps and religion, no.)

There are pictures. Mikael Enmalm contributed with these (1, 2, 3, 4) links and said (on G-punkt) that there will be more.

BTW. I have several texts to write for this blog. Sometime this week anyway there will be a few that should have been written a while ago.

EDIT:
It should be mentioned that Kejsartemplet mainly was a village-larp, with the ambition to create a real city. The plan was to have 130 buildings and I understand the reached well over 100 (obviously a few were forgotten). All player reactions that I have seen so far witness of a feeling of beeing overwhelmed by the lifelike feeling of the city.

A weekend in Stockholm

2005-07-12T11:41:00.000+02:00

Writing this I'm at Arlanda Airport soon to board a flight through Amsterdam and from there to Istanbul. A good time to write a few notes about last weekend.

My main reason for going to Stockholm was the seminar for upcoming larp Moira. Sweden has a tradition of larps with huge preparations. When the main focus is not on clothing and material, as in fantasy larp, there are drama exercises and seminars.

Moira isn't in anyway standard in setting and aim, and a lot of preparation of minds is necessary. During this day I finally grasped quite much of the setting and the general style of play which the two leading artists, Karin and Anna is trying to make us join. But there are still great gaps in my understanding of my own character. The story and concept of my main character and his sister is really great, but there is really work to be done on how to play him. He is acting as a kid, for a non-actor like me that's a quite complicated trick to do.

On Saturday night I choose not join the larp crowd to their pubbing. Instead me and Henke - an old friend at whose place I stayed - went to a party filled with people I have partied with in Stockholm many times.

With quite an hangover I woke up on Sunday to meet Tobias Wrigstad and he took me to the meeting for Knutpunkt (the annual Nordic art-larp meeting). Too few people showed up on the meeting and the organization is still lacking people. But they have backup plans and they will make it work, of course. The question is as always, through how much tears?

After that meeting I hurried back to the locale in Sundbyberg that we used the day before. There Anna-Karin Linder held some drama exercises for the crowd that I will be with in the larp. Quite fun and good, but I really have to talk more with Anna-Karin about our characters (we will be siblings, in a way).

Now I have a flight to catch.

Friform wiki

2005-06-29T16:20:00.000+02:00

Martin Swahn of Frispel has put up a wikipage for discussion of friform. Discussion will be in Swedish, so the huge troops of eager Americans will have to wait. It's here, and it's still totally empty. I guess I have to start it.

All that Jazz

2005-06-28T20:48:00.000+02:00

We have now for a while been reading about Mike Pohjolas new lajv (larp) All that Jazz (homepage in Finnish and English). I think it will be a fun event, but I won't go because of my problems in dealing with reality. But a couple of things have struck me.

Firstly, they tell us that emotional realism is the style of play. Hooray I say. This sounds like what you can expect from a Pohjola larp and that is also a quite good description of the type of play that fits me. But parallel with this you have the hilarious world description, where all players come from planets descibed as The goth planet, The western planet and The gangsters'n'jazz planet. Earth is the leading distributor of media in the galaxy and other societies choose parts of our popular culture. I can't really figure out how this background in a good way will benefit this style of play. I would really like to hear the reasoning behind this!

Secondly, isn't it nice to see Pohjola, the writer of the Turku Manifesto saying something like this:

However, in contrast to several of my previous larps, I urge players to take the enjoyment of the other players into consideration and play in a style that encourages participation.

International LARP

2005-06-26T22:45:00.000+02:00

Clash of larp styles

When starting this blog one of my main goals was to describe and learn about role playing outside of Sweden. The focus has to a large extent drifted away towards other things, but the international aspect has been surfacing a few times. One good way to learn is through contrast. I have already mentioned Jonas thing on Swedish fantasy larps. A comment there led me to a discussion (in English) about the Italian group Ordo Solis (about which I have been reading before, they seem to travel much through Europe) playing at a Swedish Enhörningen (The Unicorn) larp. Another piece of the puzzle is given in an article by one of the Ordo Solis members.

At times the above mentioned discussion get a bit heated. Of course it's about the Italians and the Germans doing OOC during the larp, and them beeing surprised of how 'hardcore' the Swedish players are. Things get even more strange when you understand that a lot of people in Sweding throw a lot of crap on Enhörningen for lacking in seriousity. I have heard several people calling their larps unplayable because of too low standards on players. In addition this larp, Vågskålen, was a beginners larp. (Let me just make it very clear that I have no opinion whatsoever, I have never joined a fantasy larp and don't know what they are like, but I'm positive that anyone larping in Sweden can agree with that certain groups of larpers have held these opinions of larps by Enhörningn. Vågskålen specifically got good reviews by all parts, as far as I have seen.)

My own, mixed thoughts

The larps I have gone to have all depicted a reality (or non-reality) closely related to some point after 1930 and they have all been short, the longest being a bit more than thirty hours. In the larps I have been to it would be unthinkable that anyone would OOC in front of other players without a very good reason. My experience with bringing new players to larps is that you never have to tell them this. When you explain that you have a role and that you will play for a certain amount of time noone misinterprets this.

What I'm trying to get to is the tradition of OOC in larp. I'm told that this was common in Swedish larps until the middle of the 90's. One obvious reason is of course that fantasy larps by tradition are very long, which gives more time for boring periods and reasons to talk OOC. But I still think that the main reason is that in fantasy larps the equipment is the main interest. To have such genuine interest for equipment (which I totally lack, I lack interest for my real self's clothing too) might of course increase your immersion in your role, but others might join the event just because of their interest in equipment and then take less seriously on the playing.

There are obviously a lot of people who have a huge interest in medieval equipment but without the interest for playing characters, as the existence of SCA proves. What we have in Sweden is a quite clear division between these two interests.

LinCon 2005

2005-06-20T10:43:00.000+02:00

LinCon is over and it turned out to give me a lot of good roleplaying events. Surprisingly much so.

When planning our games, it seemed like the available scenarios generally had a much lower quality than the ones we had to choose from at GothCon. Before that con we had a quite long argument about which to choose and had it been possible we would have liked to play a few more. But now only two events seemed interesting enough to apply for.

But. These turned out to be very good and gave me a well needed fix of friform.

Friform...för en liten stund (Friform... for little while)

I went through the con Thursday night when everything was starting up, but the real start was Friday morning with this quite unorthodox friform arrangement by Jocke Tang from S.A.R.Z. I think this group usually act as arrangers of boardgames and such, but Jocke seemed to be a scarred veteran of friform and improvisational drama.

The event was held only two times during LinCon, the first at three Friday morning and the second at ten same morning. This was a pity. I'm quite sure people would have gathered to later events, if only by rumour. Me and Anna joined the latter occasion.

In total we were seven players, excluding Jocke. He started with typical drama exercises. I have never done that kind of stuff, but it seemed to be exactly what Anna sometimes want our group to try. We haven't listened to her so far, but maybe we will...

I really liked to try these exercises out, even if the success varied much. One quite successful exercise was the freeze play. Two people entered the stage and made a scene up. After a while the GM goes "Freeze!" and the players freezes in the exact position they are in. Two new players take their place and use their physical position, but play a scene without connections to the first. The only one I remember was this one:

I start with my finger pointing at another players face.

Me: "What are your take on the meaning of Sartre's "Inauthentic human"?
Girl (agressively): "What do you think?"
Me (Lowering my arm): "I don't know, I just woke up."

The exercise I found to work best was a kind of nested freeze play. It began with only one person on the stage, who was free to do whatever scene she felt like. In our case a girl started with lying on the floor, seemingly fleeing from someone while throwing rocks in protection. In less than a minute someone of the other players were supposed to step onto the stage and start a completely new scene, but using the physical position of the person already on stage. In our case the fleeing girl became a girl posing for a magazine. A third person comes in to start a new scene, a fourth person and so on. Finally we had a scene with seven participants. The last person to enter find an excuse to leave the scene. Now the nesting comes into play: when we drop a player we go from the seventh scene to the sixth, from sixth to fifth, until we have an empty stage.

Next we played a few scenes from Taxi by RÖ30 (it can be found here). This scenario, which I had read parts of before, consists of about forty shortly described characters. The GM give roles to the players and let one or more be passangers in a taxi, while he plays the taxidriver himself. It's definitely a nice way of playing. Several of the scenes were very enjoyable, but I think that they generally would have benefited from being played slower and each for a longer time.

When I talked with Anna afterwards she found it a bit strange that anyone could write this as a scenario and claim authorship over it, since she meant that this again was almost exactly copied from a very common drama exercise.

I still haven't reached the best part. For the second half of the event Jocke used a scenario called Töreboda. It's an ASF scenario written by Gustav Edman (also the author of Under sommaren). I haven't seen the scenario text itself, but according to my understanding it consists of thirtysix characters and no predetermined story. The setting is Töreboda, an existing smallish city between the two big lakes in Sweden. The characters are people like the local drunkard, the social workers, an immigrant family, people working in the supermarkets and so on. The GM gives roles to the players and starting positions. From there everyone just cooperates to give life to these characters.

I thought Töreboda was really great and I would have liked it to go on for another hour, at least. As of now everything that I have described took place in two hours, and I haven't even told everything at all, so I gather that you understand that this was two quite intersive hours.

Huset - rum för vilsna historier (The House - room for lost stories)

This is a very ambitious joint venture by Frispel and NisseNytt. Their LinCon visit featured six different scenarios, all meant to be of shorter play than traditional con scenarios and all with a certain connection to the same house, but the location and history of the house change between the different scenarios. According to the homepage of the project there is also a seventh scenario, which they didn't bring.

The idea of their con arrangement was to give two scenarios in the time where you usually play one. All scenarios were written for four player and since we played twice we worked through four of them.

AVid fyren (At the lighthouse) was our starting point the terrible Saturday morning. The scenario was a very well crafted horror scenario with the typical dichotomy of the present characters on one side and historic events on the other and some common points to tie it together. The most remarkable about the scenario was the handouts, which were almost terryfing in their beuaty. I won't even try to beat that!

The characters gave very good possibilities to make a lot of interesting play - even if I would have enjoyed somewhat more personal information - but it could have been better if I had been less passive in the beginning. I was really slow started this time. Vid fyren is written by Anders Björkelid and he was also the one leading our play.

BRight after that we played Den som tar emot mig, tar emot er, (Whosoever receiveth me, receiveth thee) a scenario written and game mastered by Johan Nilsson. In many ways simpler than Vid fyren, it's a surrealistic story about four people coming to a house to see how it can be used for benefit of the small parish they represent. I think this scenario would get a faster and more interesting start by making the characters a bit more complex. On the other hand, that might be beside the point of the scenario, that's up to Johan to decide. Because what stays in you memory after playing is not the beginning, but the end, where you really get a chance to dissect your actions. We all liked the ending very much and Johan gave us much freedom to do what we wanted to.

CSunday. Morning. Hard. Hard. But good scenarios were waiting, so I managed to get up in time. Jakten på Josef K. (The hunt for Josef K.) started our day. Again a scenario by Anders Björkelid and once again he game mastered us. As can be understood from the name this was a Kafkaesque scenario (Josef K. is the protagonist of Kafkas The Process) with all the references tucked in nicely, but in surprising ways. The whole sessions was filled to the brim with the humour that made me read all of Kafkas books in my teens and some of them several times. Jonas has recently failed to read through The Process, personally I see this as a good alternative to make him understand Kafkas sense of humour.

Need I tell you that I loved this? It was also very easy playing my lifeless character and very much fun making up our interpretations (always wrong, wrong) of the rules guiding us in the world of bureaucracy and the strange kind Kafakesque destiny; a destiny not determined by gods, but by a faceless system of bureaucrats.

It made another problem of my own playing style obvious to me. Whenever I sit at a table with a GM to play a scenario I have a hard time not thinking of the GM and his plots. When playing away from the table I more frequently really play my character, instead of being careful not to steal the show from the GM. This is a bad way of playing, at least with GM:s as capable as these; they can always handle me playing out my character. I must learn to stop worry and instead love the bomb.

DMetanoia was our last scenario on the con. It was arranged and game mastered by Martin Svahn. This is a scenario of mutual storytelling only for people who have played a few of the scenarios in this project. It was very free and open for us to connect to the three scenarios we had recently played. It came out as very intense improvisation play for around ninety minutes. We had a lot of fun, and I think several scenes were quite successful. Though it might have been good with a bit bigger concistency in the scenes played. We jumped very much, changed characters and plots started were often soon thwarted by fits of unbound imagination.

We played very physical, reminding of what me and Anna did earlier with Friform... and that is something that I like. When talking with Martin after the game I got the feeling that it didn't go according to his vision (it was the first time he played this scenario) and he was maybe even a bit dissapointed. But anyway, we had a blast.

In addition

...we also played one completely improvised scenario from the traditional Rollspelsbaren (The role playing bar). A Jim GM:ed us through a story of taking place in Chicago of the twenties, full of gangsters, guns, tea and men in blue suits with terrible powers. It worked well and Jim seemed to be very used to this style of play and listened carefully to what we wanted and made it all end in the usual catastrophy. On time. Good.

Saturday night we played an Orpheus session, which both had drama and personal katharsis. Actually, there were personal katharsis in abundance for everyone.

Why we have to learn Danish

2005-06-19T20:05:00.000+02:00

I have quite recently been told that the Danish Friform-scene is superior to the Swedish. That didn't lead me to try prove it right or wrong. When Martin Svahn from Frispel told me almost the same thing again during LinCon this weekend I just had to look it up and compare.

If we only count free, dowloadable scenarios the selection in Danish is far beyond the one in Swedish. The largest selection of Swedish scenarios that I know of is Sveroks Scenariobanken. Compare this with Alexandria that claim to feature over 2500 scenarios in Danish (a lot of this is not friform, of course). But don't start there! Instead, go to Project Rlyeh. Their claim to fame is having one hundred of the best scenarios from Danish Cons. Some of these are system based, but most aren't. I haven't look at everything, of course, but what I have seen so far is really impressive. (All these links may be found to the right.)

I will better my Danish. But at the moment learning Turkish takes up most of my learning language-slots.

Discussions, discussions

2005-06-12T12:12:00.000+02:00

Ben Lehman, over at This is my Blog has promised to do a write up of American LARP:s. I'm looking forward to this, I'm really interested in this. Jonas Barkå responded with starting a write up of Swedish/Nordic LARP at Unrealities of mine. He has so far covered fantasy LARP and will apparantly divide the description into at least to more articles.

Tobias Wrigstad has some kind of debate from their quite different views of role playing with Jonas Karlsson at his Tobias blogs. Jonas K. has written answers there and at his own Jonas dagar. Meanwhile, me and Tobias have an ongoing e-mail debate about friform and related issues. It might or might not be published. But we keep everything in English, just in case.

Friform, lajv, tabletop

2005-06-07T22:50:00.000+02:00

I have been thinking about an article about the general differences between friform and lajv, not so much becuase of the interest of knowing, but to be able to speak about it and analyzing hybrids. Especially since there are certain types of games that fall in between these genres as they are usually used in Sweden. At the moment I feel Like I don't have to, because Vi åker jeep has done it for me.

These are observed differences more than anything else, and it doesn't at all explain how table top really is played. Table top is there as a contrast. I would like to discuss some details, but I will do that a bit later.

Updates of the day

2005-06-07T21:20:00.000+02:00

Today I have added quite a few links to the right, among them several to homepages of Swedish groups creating friform or lajv. Most of those pages are seldom updated and very little new stuff is added. I think Vi åker jeep might be the most active at the moment. They write in English too, for the benefit of human kind.

In an earlier post I was talking about games in process. The scenario I there called Trivium has now got name that will follow the poor child the rest of her life: Om Klara (About Klara). It stalled for a long time, but I have all the scenes fixed now and now it's only between me and my keyboard. I'll have it punched out in a while. It's not going to be grand, it won't gather crowds. But it might very well be ok.

Mellanrummet

2005-06-04T22:35:00.000+02:00

Lajvkoma

Now I sit at my parents house in the middle of the forest in Småland and try too act like the son they think I am. But inside huge chunks of another person is still floating around, colliding with my own self. They will go away soon, I know that – since I am quite sane actually – but right now my mind is definitely divided.

In this post I won’t say too much about details of Mellanrummet, since there will be a second installment in two weeks. After that I will post a comment with more info about Mellanrummet itself and the as well as our groups characters.

Experiences

I had a real nice time. I would say Mellanrummet is to the regular lajv as chamber music is to concerts; closer and more intimate. That is, it very much the kind of play the homepage claimed to offer and that I had thought and hoped it would be.

The whole game was about the meeting of foreigners, as far as I’m concerned. Many of the characters were very fully developed and if you didn’t get full response at a certain place it was very, at least for me as it happened, to quickly find interesting play against someone else. Often in lajvs I fall out of activity and then loose both interest and immersion until I succeed to find a focus for play.

The bigger the better

Not at all, really, but was it up to me, the time of play could have been a bit longer. I think we went on for less than five hours and I think the characters had substance for a while longer. As well the experience might have gained a bit on a little more players. But I know that this was because a lack of players and players leaving the project soon before play.

A very good part of the whole process was the creation of our group. We were four (Anna, Linnéa and Jonas) players that prepared together. We did this work at a private forum we share with a little more than ten other persons, were we created a quite large body of texts about the characters. We also did a couple of small prelajvs. This is a very good thing to do, not only because you get to practice your role, but because it let you have distinct common memories to refer to in game. This process was a lot of fun and the best part: it really payed off during play! The play in the group was very enjoyable.

I see now that Jonas already has made a post. Read.

Thank you very much, NCID and all the players! Vi ses på nästa lajv.

Obligatory reading

2005-06-02T02:41:00.000+02:00

One You should read what Jonas K. has to say about Stephen King and Vincent Baker. Two Read what Vincent himself has to say about character sheets! Everyone should read that, even my mother (well, you don't have to). At the moment, Vincent Baker is the shit, even if I think his blog is a bit too ugly. Three During the day I have updated the links with a few blogs to Forge-related people. Later I will see which Nordic links to rpg creators are worth having there. The problem seems to be that most of them doesn't update very regurlarly. That makes them much mor uninteresting.

Me and GNS

2005-06-02T02:06:00.000+02:00

Ben Lehman over at This is my blog has made a post about me and GNS, named Sven and GNS. In that thread only Ben and I are allowed to make comments. He will try to explain GNS to me there, which will be a very interesting experience. I started to write an answer, but decided to read a bit more before answering and will wait until tomorrow. It seems so simple at first, but the more pondering you pour down the thicker it gets.

The original reason for this whole thing was a question I posted at Ben's GNS / Big Model Openouse post over at his LiveJournal blog.

PTA international

2005-05-28T01:48:00.000+02:00

At the moment I'm reading (or rather listening to, but that's a terminology we are still not used to, I think) Naomi Kleins No Logo. I haven't reached very far yet, but it seems well written, interesting and a pleasure to read. There is one thing, though. I listen to what she says, all the facts she has collected and I go: "That's great! I didn't thought the world was that good already", while she seems to come to the opposite conclusions all the time.

We all know about the big brands gettings spread over the world. But what about the small, the almost infinitesimal ones? Matt Wilson posted a map of the global spread of the sales of his game Prime Time Adventures in the time span October 6 to March 3.1. PTA is well known in the indie-community, but it's still a very small product. In that period of time he shipped 229 copies. Mostly Europe and North America, of course, but still a very good international spread I think. Beauty, right? (As a counterweight to Klein I should give you a link to the place were Swedish globalization messiah Johan Norberg blogs.)

I should mention I got these links originally from Jonas K. He is kind of a fan of PTA. I read a description of a story he and others from our gaming community started, it really seemed like a blast. I would like to try it out sometime.

Friform

2005-05-18T23:33:00.000+02:00

I did som time wasting friform-websurfing. And I really got knocked out by one thing, a scenario by the group Vi Åker Jeep (We go by Jeep). Inga spår efter Alex (No trace for Alex) can be found here. I haven't read all of it, mostly parts of the text to the game masters [sic.]. I would really like to play or game master it, but requiring eight players and two game masters it's a bit heavy to get going. The textbase is also quite huge.

I won't say too much more about it here, but it includes a lot of really neat techniques and possibilities, of which the most confusing arguably is to give the GM:s meta-roles. They play different GM-characters, outside of the fiction, but it's intertwined in the game. Very confusing and beautiful. The game itself has a lot of emphasis towards player control, through techniques that to me seems to be more The Forge than Swedish Friform.

Vi Åker Jeep write more about techniques they use here. These are all picked from their game The Upgrade. Greg Costikyan (of Paranoia fame) actually writes about playing the scenario.

(BTW I must add that I really like Paranoia XP. It's the only traditional rpg:s I have seen that really works as game. I have had huge amount of fun with traditional rpg:s. But fact is that they are usuallly just a bunch of background and some isolated pieces of system. Paranoia gave me a very intense play and the mechanics really worked in it's aim to give good character play. But maybe this was only due to the GM?)

Government on role playing

2005-05-18T18:17:00.000+02:00

In Sweden everything must be classified by government; otherwise it doesn't exist. Back in 97 Ungdomsstyrelsen produced this paper (in Swedish) about roleplaying as a hobby activity in Sweden. I guess (I hope!) that such a paper would look quite different if written today. It's not meant to be read by role players, but that makes it an even more fun read for us.

In addition to the obligatory what is role playing there is also some statistics. They claim that around 20 000 people in Sweden engage in role playing regurlarly. Mor interesting, though, they estimate that approximately 200 000 young Swedes people have played at least one tiume during the last year. It seems like an extremely high number, but if it's true it should be higher now.

Games in limbo

2005-05-14T22:03:00.000+02:00

It was this meme surfacing at Andy Kitkowskis homepage

It's really simple. I call it the RPG Design Plan Hit List

STEP ONE Think back to all the ideas (anything you've thought about for more than 5 minutes or so) in the past year or two.

STEP TWO Post about your ideas. All of them. A good couplea sentences each. Tell us what excites you about these ideas. Feel free to throw in spoilers and looks under the proverbial hood- It's not as if any of us are going to steal your ideas (that would imply that we have time to even consider writing something not on our personal Hit List). If you want to keep the ideas semi-private, go ahead and lock down the entry to "friends only".

STEP THREE With the above, post a likelihood of actually getting around to writing and publishing that game.

STEP FOUR Comment on other people's game ideas. Tell them what you like, what you'd like to see, etc.

Johnny Bode

The main priority right now is definitely Johnny Bode, which I have written about earlier. I won’t write more about the mecanics now. It’s a game with an explicit game system, (something I’m not very interested in otherwise) for short sessions and intensive play. One of the few games were it’s recommended to drink alcohol while playing. It’s not a drinking game, though, so it should be small quantities. Me and Jonas just have to finish this. it will be finished.

Trivium

A short friform scenario, with a quite strict frame and without a game master. It’s supposed to be played by three players, of which no one has read the game. The flow is quite different from ordinary friform games: The game is divided strictly into four scenes, which each features the same three characters, but the players will characters between each scene. Instead of playing a character through the game, each player has a feeling attached to them. In the first scene character A might be aggressive and character B feeling guilty. Their players will change characters to the second scene, but keep the emotion. In first and fourth scene the will play the same character. For every scene each player will read a short document about the character she will play and the setting of the scene. These texts are not to be read before the game.

The characters are pretty much constructed to my satisfaction, but making the scenes fit this schedule is of course harder. There is still much to do, but I really hope complete it during the summer.

Terrorist larp

This larp, or lajv as I would rather call it to keep the Nordic terminology, is the only one I consider to be in an active phase right now. I was very into it a few weeks ago, but the two games above has moved in to take over my interest. But I still have some hope to finish this. If we at all are going to do this we will first write the most of it and then start to organize the game itself.

The game is going to be about ten political activists (or perhaps you would call them terrorists) and their social interactions in a conspiratory apartment. We are not going to use a totally straight forward lajv game flow, but will take use of a couple of techniques.

First of all the game will be cut into scenes, probably five. Each scene might be between one and two hours and all of them will take place in the apartment. Between scenes things might happen both in and outside of the apartment. The scenes will be explicitly cut and one person from the staff will tell very briefly what happened between scenes.

Secondly we will make use of something similar to a technique used in the small lajv Viljan (made as a side arrangement to Vreden). There it was called fifteen minutes of fame. Every player will have to at least once go to a specific place in the room. The game will be automatically cut and a spot light will be directed at the player. He will speak about things he’s thinking about and maybe things that has happened between scenes. (A very similar technique is actually used in Jared Sorensons InSpectres.)

Nothing is written on this game. There is no time plan, but I have hope to have it done in near future. I won’t write all by myself, but I have to start writing and then get people to help me.

Campaign larp

We got quite far in the creation of this lajv, the amount of text was not evene a fifth of the needed amount, but much of the structure was set. The thought was an initial game with around twenty people, where the heritage of an old and very rich toy fabricator was going to be divided. The main aim was to create it to be very open ended so that follow up games could be constructed with almost any combination of the original players. It should be easy for players as well as organizers. But still it was a quite big project, and we ran out of energy. But the structure is still there to be picked up. We might pick it up one day. But not in a while, that’s for sure.

The Mafia-sauna game

This is thought to be very simple and short game to play whenever you sit in and sauna and want to avoid normal socializing. The setting is the giant cyperpunk city of tomorrow, probably not on Earth. As long as anyone can remember the city has been a battlefield for mobsters. During centuries the mob leaders has tried to kill each other with a never decreasing frenzy. This has lead to an extreme paranoia. Now when they meet they always do this naked, in a sauna.

It's very important that you play this game in a sauna. Each player will have three characteristics and some special ability. In the beginning I wanted to have a game master, but this is out of the question now. The system will be a very simple distribution system.

I might complete this game, it seems like fun and it shouldn't be too hard. But it's way down the priority list.

Importance of conflict

2005-05-14T21:57:00.000+02:00

The other day I began a text about GNS, explaining my view on the whole thing, but I quickly came to the conclusion that I didn’t have anything interesting to say about it. But I will say this.

The whole wave of narrativistic games that emanates from The Forge and people inspired by The Forge discussions is a very good thing I think. They give a lot of new impulses to rpg design and point out some of great flaws of traditional games that are taken for granted. I also want move away from traditional games, (and have of course, there are a lot of alternatives out there already) but generally my departure from the tradition is in opposite direction than the typical Forge persona.

One of the many things that is often mentioned as a goal by these designers is stripping the story told to the bare bones of plot. Many of these games seem to come down to mutual creation of plot by giving focus to conflicts. After one conflict is solved you jump ahead to the next. For me that is totally uninteresting; of course it’s always fun to create stuff with friends, but for me it contains none of the kicks I get out of role playing. And there is one more things.

Plot is boring. It’s almost always needed, but with almost the same frequency also the most boring part of all kinds of fiction

And if there is anything more uninteresting for me, that’s the pure conflict, that exists only to be resolved in one way or the other.

When alone in the gym I like to listen to Henry Rollins spoken word record Black Coffee Blues. In the track monster he utters these wonderful lines.

It seems like I can confront myself all day long, but I can’t go from there. Confrontation takes little thought. I have always been good at the things that take little thought. Sure, you can confront. But what do you do next? That’s what tells you what you are.

When you roleplay you occasionally see into another world, not all the time, but you get these glimpses. When an intellectual young woman, who have spent all of her life at a university talks about gender structure in society, what does the 35 year old punkrocker think? Or more interesting, when she raises her right eyebrow to mark that she expects an answer, what is his reaction in that moment to that gesture. Just imagining that you might know something about it is really, really cool, right?

Werewolf Demo Part 2

2005-05-12T17:07:00.000+02:00

We played part two yesterday. The session had somewhat low speed, I liked it, but it got even more apparent what I like the most.

Just talking
We play these five werewolves that have very recently moved into an old house. The family that lived there before us was also a werewolf pack and - as might be suspected - people in the nearby town Manitou Springs thought them to be really strange fellows.

The day after moving in we went into town to fix electricity, buying clothes and stuff. We had to take lunch there and found a typical diner. A diner like the ones in Twin Peaks or Pulp Fiction, a kind we don't really have in Sweden. We played this by taking our in game fika, (break for coffee and cookies, that governs the life of all grown up Swedes) pretending it to be meatloaf or whatever we ordered. It was maybe twenty minutes of talking in character and looking at the diner and ordering food. It was really cool; that's what I like.

I like those scenes and I like the common bed for all the werewolfes and the special made bathroom.

The whore of the east

2005-05-11T18:18:00.000+02:00

My friend Fredrik sent me this picture, saying he took this from a window in his apartment. He lives in Shanghai, (the whore of the east) so it might just be true.

I guess normal people who see this want to travel to see this amazing buildings and to figure out how it is to live there, in this place that is so different from [enter place of residence here]. I feel that too, I admit, but most of all I immidiately got the impulse that I would like to play a character that has a specific relation to these buldings, discover that persons feeling. Isn't that the most interesting thing in the world? I might be damaged by role playing.

By the way, my next door neighbour comes from just outside of Shanghai. I guess I will continue to study him. I really have this thing of interviewing instead of discussing whenever I meet someone from a foreign country. For a long time I did that with my girlfriend too, I think. But most people like to talk about themselves, so it's usually no problems.

GothCon picture three

2005-05-11T09:57:00.000+02:00

I just have to show this picture of the skull. It hade really nothing to do with the game we played, but Orchis och Svettis (friform design group) use it as a gimick.

GothCon picture two

2005-05-10T01:42:00.000+02:00

We Look nice, right? It's just a skull in a pentagram. (It's a real skull) Kristoffer didn't like this at all, since he has this religious thing going. But he didn't say anything, 'not to hurt' the game master. Very nice of him, I think. (And that's me to the left.)

GothCon picture one

2005-05-10T01:37:00.000+02:00

After GothCon I got a heap of pictures from the event from Linnéa. Here is one...telling the truth I guess, as pictures tend to (?). We are all nice normal people. Promise

Playtest of Johnny Bode

2005-05-06T23:10:00.000+02:00

We did the playtest today of my and Jonas Johnny Bode - rollspelet. First I should actually say something about the game and the myth it's bult around. Bode himself is a very unusual character - today mostly known in some student environments for his porno songs, but during his long life he had several careers and more personal tragedy than one family usually can hold. If I was to tell the story it would be too long as well as not very coherent. Read on the net, there is a quite good article in Swedish Wikipedia. A much worse, but very typical, piece of article can be seen here. The most famous biography is En herre i frack (1992) by Bengt Nyquist och Ingmar Norlén, which is where I have learnt most of what I know about him. In 2003 Norlén published Jakten på Johnny Bode, which I think is an enlarged version of the former book, but I have yet to read it.

To understand the game, though, you don't have to know anything about him. But it's probably a good thing to know something about Stockholm in the '30s. In the game you always play strange characters from the party elite in Stockholm, around 1934. But it's not really 1934 and it's not really Stockholm. It's the mythic '30s.

Each game is strictly diveded into scenes, typically as many as the amount of players. Each scene is divided into two parts. The first part is the short dining phase (dineringsfas), where all the players are eating together and talking about old memories. One of them mentions something about a specific event: "Do you remember that night in August when we had a breakfast ontop of Karl Gerhards dog?" After this initial statement everyone mention one peculiar fact about the night, because it's usually about night. It's almost always about parties and about famous and decadent people in the '30s.

Then the adventurephase (äventyrsfasen) commence. Now the player who made the first statement acts as a game master, at the same time as he is playing a character. All characters have a few (typically 3-5) abilities ranked 1-5. These abilities can for example be Fat 3, Odd sexual needs 4, Night club singer 2 or Good toaster 5. Each player has five cards in hand and when using an ability he usually plays one card and either substracts or add the ability from it. The gamemaster makes a interpretation of the outcome. All court cards have speical uses, which give the players more control over the game flow, but I won't go into them here.

When the game master thinks the scene has come to a good end he breaks and you continue with the two phases of the next scene. Another player is now the game master.

When we played it today we were quite in a hurry and had only time to play one scene out of four, but the scene turned out to be quite long. I must say the game had a very nice flow and I think we all had a hilarious time. Anna and Linnéa caught the idea of the game without any problems, in spite of being a bit sceptic before start.

Of course there were a few things to think about.

I think there is a risk for scenes running too long, (this is a game which should end before two hours of play) so give a bit more strict advice about what the role of the game master is, should be a good thing.
I thought on beforehand that the number of abilities should be very low, but after the game everyone seems to think that we should have a bit more of them.
As of now we have three kinds of special cards. The players really enjoyed them and wanted more of them. We are thinking of different ways of doing this.

We will change a few details as of now, but keep everything that is seen as core. It woul be interesting to play it with Jonas K, he always have these points of views that are totally new to me. Sometimes very good. We might continue this session later, we'll see about that.

We are only a few, and we are fighting

2005-05-06T00:56:00.000+02:00

One of the more bizarre ingredients in my life the last year is the role playing theory fights. We have had a great schism in our small role playing group here in linköping. In the end I think it all will end in everyone having more insight than before.

Gathered on one side in this debate (most of the times) are me and Jonas. I guess our place in the debate has been defending friform (this is not even what we play mostly; but it's not always easy to choose side in a debate). Another Jonas have had a lot of new views, of which many have emanated from The Forge and allies. I will call him Jonas K for clarity (which is a bit silly, since I have known him much longer than the former Jonas; but what can a man do?).

A few more people have been caught in the middle of these debates. At the moment I must say I feel we have a quite good mutual understanding and a I really feel like this has helped me to get a much better understanding of the medium.

The point, though

But really, the point is really creating games. Jonas K has been quite efficient in this so far this year. I think you can find all of his games here, several of them (three I think) are from the annual dogmautmaningen (dogma challange) at the forums at www.rollspel.nu. I haven't played even one of these games yet, but I hope to. Especially since most of them are designed in ways that are very unfamiliar to me.

The most productive in our gaming community is Tobias. His magnus opus (so far) is Millennium. He has also had quite some success in dogmautmaningen, and this year he was the total victor with quite some margin. I'm not sure at the moment where to find these games, but I will link them later. I have made a character in Millennium once, but never actually played it. (Edit: Tobias dogmagames are actually very easily found to the right at his Millennium page.)

Orpheus and more

2005-05-06T00:26:00.000+02:00

By the way, we heard from Bishop again

The Orpheus campaign is really good, and we have alot of good internal stories. But it's by far the the longest campaign I have ever played and I'm not too big on epic campaigns. It's simply getting a bit too long, but I'm still very curious of what will come. I usually like my characters best when they are new to me. As you easily get tired of yourslf, you get tired of old characters.

Actually there will be som Orpheus tomorrow too, only scenes of the more domestic kind. I'm really looking forward to the actually; they might be interesting. The background for the scenes are: Tadeusz (my character) and Nagi (Annas character) are a couple since quite a while. Nagi is not only former Orpheus agent, but also native american freedom fighter from a family full of native american freedom fighters, who all have quite some problems with white people, even when they are of Polish heritage. No my Tadeusz will try to be acknowledged by the family. We will do this in short, but probably quite intense scenes.

I still haven't decided how I will play, if Tadeusz will be diplomatic or aggressive. Anyway, i think might be interesting.

This won't take much time, I think. After this we will probably do a short play test of my and Jonas Johnny Bode - rollspelet (Johnny Bode - the Role PLaying Game). The version of the game that is existing now has been in existance for over a year, but has nevere been playtested, most dy to that everyone else around us always talk in extremely negative ways about this game. I really can't understand why they hate us just because we have had a few thoughts about creating a game that is neither basic roleplaying nor d20.

Anyway, now we have gathered the courage to try it out. Regardless of how it turns out I will push for a new playtest soon.

Meanwhile

In Istanbul Turkeys first IKEA opened today. Large cues were created immediately, as in all countries. They also prepare to open a store in Izmir, Turkeys third city. In Izmir they have Izmircon (to keep the rpg theme). IKEA is better on spreading around the globe than our RPG:s.

Werewolf: The Forsaken

2005-05-04T23:38:00.000+02:00

It was quite recently it struck me that what gives me the biggest kicks in roleplaying is socializing, especially meeting new people - in character. It's really hard to explain why it's like that; but one explanation I have thought off is that

it is exciting, maybe the most exciting thing in life, to meet new people,

but I'm so damn tired of introducing my own self to people and I'm just so damn tired of my own self that I really don't want to talk about it.

It's really (at least in Sweden) seen as quite polite, when you meet a new real person, that you present yourself as the physical person the state accept you as (yes, I define myself through the state). And you always have to the same things about the pathetic life you are living.

But of course, there's more to it than that. Talking to a person while - in the shared imaginative space - having a complete different history than your real is simply amazing. It enables so many questions and feelings that you normally can't reach.

I remember being S'Rin Foug, (Fading Suns) a quite good body guard, mediocre person and outright bad opera writer, who only wants to be A terrific writer of operas, a nice and warm person and actually not at all a body guard. I remember being him on a geo stationary station talking to nobles and tecnicians and finally meeting the greatest opera star in known part of the galaxy. I remember being Hedlund in Aurora Borealis, a quite ordinary worker in the '30s, suddenly sitting together with all this important people planning a trip to the South pole. And they were actually listening to me! I explained to these engineers and all kinds of big people what my dogs needed and what they could do and they planned accordingly. Truly amazing for Hedlund.

Yesterday we played Werewolf: The Forsaken, the first installation of the online demo game. It was a really nice session. The thing for me was the meeting with the other players. Everyone made good interpretations of their characters and I'm a quite a bit curious still about everyone of them. That's a very good sign. My character Mike Berringen is closer to me than my characters have been in quite a while (I have played a lot of rapists lateley, I'm really tired of that. It's a heavy burden to carry, even when he just shares mind with you for a short while.) and that was a really nice experience. He cares much for his political views, left wing they might be, but it's the same kind of conviction.

One small detail is hard to understand, though, but that's an American thing. It says in his background that he earlier used to carry a gun for self protection. I guess this is a normal way of thinking in US, but for me more than absurd that a normal computer nerd (blogging is his main business) would get gun. US must be the only rich country where this is considered a reasonable way of thinking.

One detail made a lasting impression on several of us players. The huge bed made for a werewolf pack and the specially constructed bathroom with room for a lot of simultaneous guests. Our characters (and we) were quite surprised at this. But they soon found it very normal. After all; this is a pack of wolves. The pack instincts colliding with the modern world is an important concept in W:tF. This is beautiful.

A late night note about a discussion

2005-05-03T00:12:00.000+02:00

Eirik Fatland about Panopticorp

PanoptiCorp was, for me, an attempt to do something a bit more contemporary and a lot more light-hearted than - say - Kybergenesis, Europa or OB7. Something to show that LARP can deal with serious issues through play and humour rather than tears and existential crises. It failed.

The famous Mellan Himmel och Hav (right before I went into Larping, but it might have been too much for me anyway) was supposed to show happiness instead of angst in serious larp. A very good lajv, everyone say. But it kind of failed in the happiness department it seems, with some scenes getting extremely heavy and full of dark feelings. I think they even broke game once because it went too far.But I have heard different versions about this.

I guess Moira is going to try for something along this line. I think, they definitely try for something diffent, but I really haven't understood the goal of the game.

But this is not really my point for the moment. I really just want to say that I would like to make a lajv where half of the players are, let's say bosniaks, (the moslem population in Bosnia) and the second half are Swedish. They never speak a word of a common language and the two groups have extremely different roles, different in the hierarchical ladder, but als with totally different play. Nice, right?

Good night

Wave of mutilation

2005-05-01T00:20:00.000+02:00

I have really done quite little role playing so far this year, but now I seem to have fallen into a role play frenzy. I have written here about the latest things played and here is the continuation:

On Tuesday Werewolf: The Forsaken, the new WoD Werewolf. Jonas will game master (since he got it for free and is supposed to write a review. It will be interesting to go back to dice.
The coming weekend Anna will resurface in Linköping for a couple of days. I'm not really certain what we will play. It will at least be Orpheus, but hopefully something more.
Mellanrummet, a lajv by NCID, in the beginning of June. I'm really looking forward to this game. These people are serious in their work and I like the approach towards us players that Erik Stormark shows.
A lot of writing ideas. But you never know if I actually write something.

The name of this entry has nothing to do with the content. It's just the name of a good Pixies song.

Beginning the journey between Blekinge and Atlantis: Blekinge and an aeroplane from Lanzarote

2005-04-30T01:10:00.000+02:00

I have previously mentioned Från Atlantis till Blekinge (From Blekinge to Atlantis; Blekinge is a province in Sweden) by ASF, the former friform writing collective that these days is a company. I think I have treated the book as an artefact already; now it's time for the game evaluation - the holy grail of game reviews.

From Lanzarote to Göteborg

There are three full scenarios in book, three scenarios which have all been played in gaming conventions. In addition there is a small game called Plan 714 till Göteborg, which is played in les than 45 minutes. We played it in less than thirty. I arranged the game last week. Three of my players were from the Regula Falsi group, Jonas, Linnéa and Kristoffer. But I also tricked two completely new players into it, Elna and Oskar from my student corridor! They haven't done any kind of role playing, but since friform is more intuitive than sex I was sure it would work out great.

The game is very simplistic and leaves very little work to the game master. Two couples have had a common vacation to Lanzarote and are now on the plane heading to Sweden. If you have five player there is also an older man Bengt, sitting between the two couples. Each player get a character description of little less than one page, which they read before the game. I told the players to play on drama more than realism.

We put five chairs in a line on the floor in Linnéas living room and let them be cahirs in the plane and then just stepped on it. As always the first two minutes were a bit slow, but the players very soon found a good pace, reached a climax after maybe twenty minutes and a few minutes later I called it off.

The game worked very nice actually and I think everyone hit the spot of his/her character. We concluded after the game (but also guessed before) that one weak part of the scenario is Bengt. The game might run a bit tighter with only four players. Bengt has no relation at all to the other players, while the other four all have some relation to each other. He is also a bit hard to play. But Jonas did a really great interpretation of Bengt complete with answering questions just too many seconds too late, dropping things all the time and making the completely wrong comments. So his character worked out fine, but I suspect he was quite a bit of a speed bump for the problem solving between the two couples.

I really think everyone enjoyed themeselves. And I liked Elnas comment that night after the game: "I you only would stop calling this role playing, then you might actually get some grown ups playing this." That's a paraphrase, but that was what she meant. They do. In Norway.

From Adulthood to Blekinge

Under sommaren (During the Summer) is a scenario written by Gustav Edman (who by a sheer coincidence at the moment share apartment somewhere in China with a friend of mine). I arranged this scenario earlier this week with Jonas, Kristoffer, Linnéa and Anders as players. The pace is quite the opposite to the one above. I have never really done any role playing like, a few lajv-experiences might partly be a bit close, but no table top. The scenario is calm and sad, quite slow and very little story. There is a kind of emotional crescendo built into the game, but even this isn't too intense. After the game it seemed like everyone had peaceful and cathartic experience.

It's all about summers past. Five youngsters had these wonderful summers together. During semesters they had mostly other friends, but in the summers it was always these five. And they all knew that this was their best time, just hanging out together under the immense freedom of childhood summer. Over five years have passed, they have all moved away from the small town Älvsjö in Blekinge. Or rather four of them have left Älvsjö and one day they all get the message that their fifth friend has passed away. Mikael never left his hometown. He was two years younger than the other, but he was also a bit different. Retarded some might say. Let's just say he was different. But it really doesn't matter, because now he's dead.

The game starts when the four arrives to the small main square of Älvsjö. This game also gives very little work to the game master, since the almost the whole plot is already in the written characters. The character texts are three or four pages long and are very wellwritten both to keep the scenario together and to give a distinct different feel for each character. A nice touch is the significantly different language used in the part where the characters describe themselves.

The game is cut into eight scenes. I had actually some worries that my players might do completely other stuff, but led by the well written character text base they all naturally did what the scenario predicted. It was quite beautiful to see how the plot automatically evolved so nicely just by the players playing their characters and taking appropriate stuff from their background. It was really hard for me to see, while reading the scenario, that it would evolve so nicely. I'm quite sure this game has been played a lot of times and being subject to change in a long process.

Not all players would like this game, I'm sure. It could very well be seen as boring by many. It's slow and all drama is on an emotional level. But the scenario is really written to do and be these things and nothing else. I find it very hard to really criticize the scenario as such, then you would only criticize what it aims to be. Maybe I could think that it would be interesting to play the same kind of scenario with characters slightly less tragic.

We had a really nice time playing this and I really think this is worth a try for everyone. Friform as medication for your soul.

More

The two scenarios we have left (both much longer than Under sommaren) have I left to Jonas to read. I will really try to make him game master a scenario soon. Either one from the book or one from the old Friforms boxen from ASF, which Jonas has.

Wrongdoers

2005-04-29T00:23:00.000+02:00

Sometimes things just go wrong.

Mytteriet - LARPing in sign language

2005-04-25T23:21:00.000+02:00

When we participated in the submarine lajv U-359 last year we spent the night afterwards with a few Danes. One of them being Lars Munck, who played the captain in our game. He mentioned that in addition to the three games of U-359 they were going to run one more game in the submarine. Lars said he had created this game together with Norwegian larpwright Eirik Fatland.

It was a sci-fi game for deaf kids, held in sign language about a war in space between deaf and hearing. It sounds fantastic, right? I haven't heard about it since, (maybe it was mentioned once last weekend) but only now I saw Eirik Fatland's note about the game on his homepage.

In i Evigheten

2005-04-23T14:39:00.000+02:00

Last Saturday I went to my first lajv in almost a year. In i evigheten (Into Eternity) was organized by Fabel and took place in a castle-like place in Göteborg. Contrary to most lajv and roleplay creators Fabel is a company and at least has profit as a goal. If there really is any profit in their arrangements so far I don't know, I'm definitely a bit sceptic. But I really think this is the way to go. Not the only way, but one way that is needed as a compliment if we want the lajv scene to continue moving.

I arrived in Göteborg around noon together with Linnéa and Jonas. Before going to our hostel we roamed for a short while. We made a visit to sf-bokhandeln, (the Science Fiction Bookstore) were we got really stuck in a rpg discussion with this woman who is working there. I have yet to hear her name, but we talked to a her a couple of times at GothCon too, mostly for the reason that me and Jonas thought it was highly immoral that they they closed their shop so early at the convention. Long discussions about WoD is always an important ingredience in a well groomed life, even if you are not really much into it, like me. I kind of got the impression that this wasn't as obvious to Linnéa as to me and Jonas. In additon to very important comparisons (no irony) between old and new WoD I got tricked into buying Zonernas zoologi. A very nice Mutant book indeed. And I got it cheap. Linnéa bought Västmark. After this we went to a clothes shop called Shock. A lot of leather and hard rock aesthetics. Things I cannot understand. I will never go back.

After a hostel visit and some powernapping we walked to the meeting place. I was quite surprised that I recognized as many people as I did from earlier games. We got our roles quickly (especially us, since we were a bit late) and started to talk with the ones we were supposed to know before the start of the game. Soon we entered a bus and were given seats according to our characters.

The basic story behind In i evigheten is that serial killer has done four killings in Göteborg. In a quite unusaul study in witness pshychology at Göterborg University four psychologists gather around 40 persons that have been witnesses to one of the murders or at least have been in the the vicinity. These are the players, who are driven out by bus to the coastline. I won't say much more about game details, since Fabel plan to run this game again.

First I must say that the practical arrangements surrounding the game were terrific. Most things ran very smoothly, with only a few very small hickups. I think the content of the game surprised many of the players. While the homepage indicated a detetective/mystery sort of game, it developed more into a confessional drama with a lot of catharsis.

I really enjoyed the game and after the game my head has been full of ideas about roleplaying and lajv, as it should be after a good event. Maybe the best of all is that Fabel claim that they will try to produce two events like this per year. Since the amount of non-fantasy lajv is quite low this would be a very good addition to the Swedish scene. Many of the ones that already exist may also seem a bit pretentious (even if this might not be the case) and scare new players away. Fabel use the term 'plug-and-play' about their productions, with which they mean that they don't need extensive preparation from the players. This is not possible for all game concepts, of course. But when simplicity is possible; it's always the best option.

Later I will probably write snappier text with some organized notes about what was good and what they should think about when doing new productions. Now I just need sleep.

Dragonbane postponed

2005-04-22T16:08:00.000+02:00

On G-punkt one can read that Dragonbane is postponed until next year! No big surprise there, I think most people felt this was coming. Seems like they will split it into two, with a workshop and a prologue this year and the larp one year later.

More wisdom from Zonernas Zoologi

2005-04-21T14:37:00.000+02:00

"Domesticerade dumdjur

Utöver ulkbiff, heta doggar, knasaröv och tärnad kutaost kan en mängd utsöktheter framställas ur Skandiens dumdjur. Och då talar jag inte om de läckerheter som finns gömda i vildmarksmonstrens kroppshyddor; de som djärva äventyrare hembringar med risk för lem och livslåga. [...]"

RPG:s in Sweden

2005-04-21T00:15:00.000+02:00

During GothCon me and Jonas talked about the publishing of traditional rpg:s in Sweden. Everyone who was interested in these games in the early '90s know that quite an amount of games and supplement books were published in that time. This was later followed by a grave decline, even if the quality of what was actually published increased. During the end of that decade I guess that the only big game in Sweden at that was Eon from NeoGames.

During this decade the output has started to increase and counted by pages todays output is enormous compared to the one twelwe years ago. When counted by quality, both in text and layout there isn't even need to compare. The difference is so huge that it's painful to even think of a comparison. What we noted at GothCon was that now the output even in number of books must be beyond anything reached before.

More books, while every book has five times the amount of text, most of them in hard cover (this is a quite sudden trend, visible also on the American market) and finally - after all these years - a nice layout is to be expected in rpg books!

Two games are definitely ahead of the competition at the Swedish market at the moment. Firstly, Riotminds Drakar och Demoner 6 is at least very beautiful and has made an interesting turn of the old Drakar och Demoner name towards Nordic mythology, although I haven't read it.

SecondlyMutant is just brilliant in all relevant aspects. I can't understand how these guys can produce so much and with this high standard. This weekend we went to Göteborg again to attend a lajv we dropped by the science fiction bookstore. I couldn't resist buying Zonernas Zoologi, not one of the newest Mutant releases. I'm not planning to play Mutant anytime soon, but the very special form of comedy, the wordplay and the imaginative world descriptions are definitely enough. Here are the ingrediences in a lovely recipe form the world of Mutant (for those who know Swedish).

ÄRG-I-PANNA
4-6 normalstora BUKAR

1 duktig klump ärghanesvål
1/2 knasaröv
1 normalstor kraftpära
Ister av valfri sort
Några nypor havssalt
1 krus jolmsmör
1/2 krus hummelhåning
2 svarta pantzerlökar
1 hel spirlöksklyfta
10 torkade giftgröneblad
1 limpa torrt vitt gumsebröd

But aside of these two games there are a lot of new things that seem to be happening. Two years ago at GothCon Krister Sundelin sold his, then brand new, print of Västmark 3. A good game, as I have noted before, but the book as an artifact was quite disappointing, I remember. Bleak looking, with a boring soft cover. This year he sold Andra imperiet, which was hard cover with nice layout and manga all over! I was so close to buying it, only because of the looks. I probably wonät ever play it...but when I get a salary... He said because of EU he could now print it in one Abltic country, for the same price as before but with this much higher quality. Isn't globalization wonderful? (it is actually)

There is more. All what I have been writing about above are standard games, all owing everything to the American game industry. But it seems like other parts of the Nordic role pålaying tradition is slowly finding it's way out to the book market. In Finland we first had Mike Pohjola publishing Myrskyn Aika. It seemed a bit traditional I must say, but still, he is a strong voice from the more hardcore part of the larp-scene. There have also been a lot of talk about Draug (which Krister Sundelin actually was selling at GothCon). Both these were released not by a rpg company, but by a traditional book company. We still wait for the same thing to happen in Sweden. The young angry man of the Nordic Larp scene, Juhana Petterson is a bit less angry and writes much better these days. He seems to be getting a book published (read that column, it's very good). I really hope they get it translated to Swedish or English.

Recently, though, ASF published their book about Swedish friform (a genre sometimes called Finnish freeform, for stupid reasons). They printed this in only 1000 copies and have so far sold a few hundred. This is a nice and beautiful book, but most of all the first role playing book I have so far seen that is not about children's games. It really deserves a greater audience. Rpg with dice will never reach a large audience among adults, this kind of scenarios is so much easier (and more rewarding to play, I must say) to start with. I will write more about this in a later post.

The golden age of role playing is now. Promise.

GothCon

2005-04-20T15:15:00.000+02:00

This should have been written a couple of weeks ago, but life and a general knack for living life in a worse manner than necessary led me here. But I'm not here to purge myself, I'm here to talk about games.

Since this life is about doing little and using the majority of the time to digest and talk about what you actually did, Jonas has already written about How we survived GothCon. Five of us went there and two returned without dying even a bit, which is a quite astonishing result after the typical Swedish horror friform session of the last night.

For us five this years GothCon was really about RPG.

Fem och slottsmysteriet (Five and the castle mystery) was the third part of three in a series of rpg-convention adventures created for Västmark. I have earlier gamemastered the first adventure in the series - Faller snö växer sten - with a group that to a very large extent was the same as this time (only now I was a player) and must say that we found that one a bit problematic. Strange enough this scenario had some of the same faults.

But first to the good stuff. We all enjoyed playing it, most due to nicely created characters. They have without any doubt been the best part in both our Västmark-encounters. So good actually that Linnéa decided to buy the book (Västmark version 3, version 2 can be found free on the net). The cast is of a quite unusal kind for people used to american rpg:s. Four young girls and one boy were the adventurers this time. In the first episode only the four girls were present. A lot of roleplaying goodness was made between these, according to me.

But the scenario wasn't as good. We arrived at a castle, carrying a wounded knight. The lot living at the castle were a strange bunch indeed and as time went by you realized with an increasing certainty that a lot of things were wrong with our hosts. The worst thing in the old scenario - Faller snö... - was inability to interact with other characters, since they were all made stupid by a curse. A bit of the same problem was found this time, but as I understood it afterwards this partly was due to our gamemaster, who cut out some of the communication parts.

At the moment I'm not much into roleplaying with any kind of dice and I haven't accepted fantasy as an acceptable form of mind food during this decade. For being a game containing fantasy as well as dice it's really good and has quite nicely thematic mechanics. But it contains dice and fantasy, so it is definitely disqualified from my main brain food.

Bli snygg eller rappa på svenska (Get beautiful or rap in Swedish) was a scenario from the extremely strange Swedish countryside humoresque RPG Svenil. Some of us played a very successful scenario led by the main creator of the game two years ago at GothCon. Our GM this year was a much younger person, but as good. Actually he was very enthusing and energetic and without him we hadn't been able to find that typical Swedish Svenil atmosphere. Still, I must say I couldn't really get into the game. I can't really explain why, I guess I had some problems with my character.

Guzman is a immigrant rapper from the Swedish suburbs. Only that he is born not in the suburbs and his parents are actually from the Swedish middle class. He is also a quite bad rapper, but will now try to make money through a docu soap, where a fat Finnish man will be turned into a hardcore rapper.

There were a lot of fun stuff, but for me it was a bit over shadowed by the fact that I struggled with my character.

Snövit tomhet (Snow white emptyness) was this years friform scenario. I'm quite sure that these have decreased in availability during the last years and that is really a shame. This one was a traditional horror game with an expected everyone-dies-or-get-insane ending. Not very new, but a good solid game, even if I have a bit of a problem with this obsession about having scenarios being deterministic towards the death of all characters.

But it was definitely my favourite game of the three scenarios played. Me, Kristoffer, Anna, and Linnéa played men at 45 years of age special forces soldiers doing a repetition exercise in the Swedish military led by a very young girl, played by Jonas. To make things worse we got real ammo, real grenades and real everything. To make things even worse my character was a very unpleasent lawyer, working for Swedish Hells Angels and having a bad history of pedophilia. Why not throw us back to the 15:th century also.

A lot of fun it was. I have a lot of stuff to write, but that will have to wait until when it's not 2 in the morning.

Moira full; Lajv catastrophy

2005-03-22T22:13:00.000+01:00

I haven't larped for quite some time and I'm really not satisfied with my own achievements on the ones I so far have gone to. I had really thought I would be going to Moira, but now it's full! My bad not sending in my registration I guess, but I didn't think it would be that popular. I'm writing it now, there might be a small chance, even if they say they have quite a lot of backup players already.

Obviously there will be quite an amount of non-Swedish speaking people, which will be playing in their native language. It would be interesting to hear which nationalities will be present. The Nordic LARP-environment is quite used to play with eachother. My only experience is playing with Danes at U-359. The problem there was of course that we were supposed to speak the same language (Russian!) and at least for me it was ofte a bit too hard to understand what they were saying. Especially in the motor room, surrounded by the huge sound of the engines. As long as you speak different languages in-game it's a quite different story.

Now I will write them an application anyway.

More on linguistics of water salesmanship

2005-03-10T23:05:00.000+01:00

At the same time as I wrote about Dune yesterday I sent a letter to Khalid about his Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert's "Dune" page. He responded quickly to my email and also updated his page to reflect what I said. Very excellent.

We also talked about other things. I knew that Turkish has a lot of Arabic words, (obviously the mentioned 'sihir' is originally an Arabic word, also meaning 'magic') but it has never struck me that a large part of the Arab world uses a lot of words with Turkish origin. This is of course especially true for the parts which have been under Ottoman rule, as Egypt.

It was very interesting for me to see his list about the origin of Herberts terminology. As I told him It was interesting to learn that when we during our adolescence screamed Kull wahad! when surprised, we in reality screamed in Arabic.

More Middle East

2005-03-10T22:32:00.000+01:00

I thought this blog was supposed to be about my roleplaying activities, and not the Middle East. But at the moment my activities are either boring or nonexisting, so you have to without them.

Firstly Israel

The Israeli Army frowns on Dungeons and Dragons we can read at www.ynetnews.com. I have never played D&D, nor have I been in any military. Both are probably needed, but definitely not fitting for people with my mindset. (And I don't mean this in a boasting "I'm too free of mind for you" way. I mostly mean that I'm lazy and unstructured.) It strucks me that they have strong similarities in their absolute hierarchy; in both systems you simply continue to get more powerful, gather more might or you die. This in stark contrast to normal society (or other, more modern games) where something in between is the more common reality. (Thanks to Fredrik for the link)

Then Iraq

You should all read Riverbends latest post where she writes about why Chalabi should have the Nobel peace prize. It doesn't matter if you don't care about Iraq, she's such an excellent writer that her control over the text is enough. And this time more poisonous than ever. It has nothing to do with RPG:s of course.

Cries of water in fiction and reality

2005-03-09T22:19:00.000+01:00

I thought I had left Turkey for now, but i have to get back there in this blog. I have to write about an epiphany that was brought to my by the wonderful clash of nerddom and reality. Or should I say between the perceptions of water sellers in Arrakis and Istanbul.

It was in Taksim

Taksim is the modern center of Istanbul. While the average tourist quickly visits Tapkapı, Hagia Sofia, (Aya Sofia) and Sultanahmet Camii (Blue Mosque) and maybe, maybe fights her way along the narrow streets up to Sulimaniye mosque many never even crosses the Golden Horn and have no idea about the real city center, that is Taksim a few kilometers north of the tourist quarters. (See this map)

I don't even think I noticed it the first time we went to Taksim, but one of several times there I hear immediately when we get out of our bus: "Soo, sook soo. Soo, sook soo". Boys are selling 0.5 litre water bottles and yelling this "Soo, sook soo. Soo, sook soo. Sook soo. Sook soo." Anyone who bothers to read these ramblings should understand that I was directly transported to Arrakis (and to all our ignorant friends, we are talking about the cult classic Dune by Frank Herbert).

Water sellers on Arrakis have two distinct yells for making themselves heard: "Soo soo sook" and "Ikhut eight". When this is originally explained in the book it says that the origin is "unknown". From when I first read this book about ten years ago I took that as a nod to the reader that its origin lies in our world. The authentic Turkish yell above should be spelled "Su, soğuk su" and means simply "Water, cold water". "su" should be pronounced as the Swedish "so", speakers of English will never be able to learn anyway, so don't even try. "soğuk" is a bit harder, but first of all skip "ğ", this "soft g" is a very arcane letter and only Turks understand the difference. "o" sound very similar to a Swedish 'å', so you have something like: "Su, såok su".

When I understood that I had to write this I wondered if someone else on Google has noticed this. Not quite it seems, but partly. I found a nice page about Arabic and Islamic themes in Frank Herbert's "Dune". About this the writer Khalid says:

Water-seller's cry on Arrakis. Sook is a market place. In Turkey, street vendors will peddle juice by shouting 'Suyu'. 'Su' also means drink.

So he misses the part of the expression, but he should be excused since it seems like his main point is the arabic influences. He has no explanation for Ikhut Eight, though. I really thought this to be arabic.

On a bus over the Bosphorous

There. On a crowded bus I saw a man filling in a character sheet. Only once, but it's fantastic, right?

Turkish role playing

2005-03-07T21:56:00.001+01:00

Sihir

Well it was a saturday, it was incredibly hot and I was standing in a Games Workshop store in Istanbul. During most of my visit in Istanbul so far it had been cold for the season - still very warm for a Swede who thinks everything above zero degree Celsius outdoors is like entering a wet bathroom floor without noticing. But now it was well over thirty degrees and me and Seden was happy to escape into the the very typical air conditioned mall where Sihir ('magic') was cramped into a very diminutive room.

Comercially RPG is very small in Turkey, as far as I can understand it. I got my first perception of Turkish role playing from A Day at Castle Krachfeld, which is a very neat and to-the-point page about a one time LARP that was held in Istanbul. In addition to that the LARP was based on Kafkas very short story The Law - which, if I remember correctly is also included in the unfinished novel The Castle - and with very clear vision of the formalistic part of the LARP. Even if it might seem just a touch too bare boned it's very Nordic, if I may say so.

During my time in Turkey the feeling of need to find out more about the RPG situation in the country grew. At least I should find a shop if there was one in the whole of Istanbul. I have glanced through several Hungarian RPG books, without knowing a single word of their language. It is of course very important to know about RPG in different languages. (Yes you can feel it too) So I e-mailed one of the guys who were behind that Krachfeld thing and asked about places that sold RPG:s in Istanbul. He answered with a very friendly letter in which he gave me two names: Sihir and Kayie Kafe, both in Beşiktas district on the European side.

Well, through some internet work Seden found Sihirs whereabouts and we went there on a crowded bus - as always - crossing the Bosphorus by the first bridge and then into the center of Beşiktas . I guess only a very certain kind of person would understand my joy of standing in that extremely small store, half the size of my student room, filled with only Warhammer stuff. I haven't even ever played Warhammer, the only GW game I have played is Bloodbowl. At home I wouldn't have cared at all to enter the store, but now it was a sudden break in the exotism. There were two men in there. They explained that this other place, Kayie Kafe, now was closed, but after talking a while they mentioned a place called Gerekli şeyler - Necessary things.

Gerekli şeyler

A couple of days later this took us to a much smaller mall in a completely different part of Istanbul, which we found thanks to help from Sedens father. I must admit I don't remember which district, but it was among cars and people as always. Problem was the shop had moved. Seden talked with several people and strange enough a guard knew to tell us that the store had moved to a place nearby. More to the point; he said that it had moved to behind Teşvikiye mosque.

Teşvikiye mosque was just outside the mall and we went past it to what we grasped as behind, but to no avail. Seden talked with more people and as far as I understood the term behind Teşvikiye mosque was locally quite well defined to a certain street. We searched for a quite long time and I was now getting a bit distracted by the fact that I had spent so much of our common time in Istanbul at finding a place where RPG:s are sold. As a last measure we went into a pharmacy to ask the personnel. The woman who talked to us said she might have heard of this Gerekli şeyler, but didn't really... I could understand that. So we went out, we both wanted to get out of this extreme heat and Seden made a claim of the kind: "We will check this street only and then give up." I agreed.

A boy came running out from the pharmacy when we were only ten metres away from it. I guess he found it hard to talk to us when we spoke with the woman, but now he told excactly where to find these necessary things we were looking for. It wasn't very far, but we had not found it without him.

Then finally the store. They mostly sold comics, but had a shelf with american RPG and also the Turkish translation of D&D Players Handook. I guess I regret now that I didn't buy that book, but I will have the opportunity next time.

Conclusion and why Ravenloft?

In all this, in this description of my hunt for RPG:s for sale in Istanbul one little detail stands out as a really typical Turkish characteristic. The boy who ran after us to tell us about the whereabouts of the shop. That kind of incidents happens all the time when walking Turkish streets. Never be surprised and accept the help.

There are also other things I noticed. During the time in Istanbul we went through several bookstores and I saw a lot of translated RPG fiction books. And judging by their position in the store they sold really good. It was Ravenloft, Forgotten Realmes and other stuff. If they even translate the fiction, I thought, then they must translate even more RPG:s. Right? Not so. The guy I talked to in Gerekli şeyler said that Players handbook indeed was the only RPG book at all existing in the Turkish language.

When at home in Sweden I had to e-mail one of these companies that made these translations of D&D fiction, Ankira and ask if these notions really where true. He was a bit surprised by my letter he said and he said 'yes' and explained the reason for only translating novels and not the games themselves to be of copyright character. I couldn't really understand that. He also said that a company called Arka Bahçe planned to do game translations.

This about Turkish RPG.

Amidst turmoil and chaos

2005-02-26T19:57:00.000+01:00

Even if roleplaying has been the most continous thing in my life from eleven years of age until now, fifteen years later, it has seldom gone so far as to actually play very often. My most common stance has actually been the aspiring roleplayer, with all the props that you expect from such a person: unfinished maps of ridiculous quality, sketches of new games with nothing more than lists of weapons and four digit skills.

Then suddenly, about two years ago activity suddenly spurred and roleplaying was not longer only discussed, but also played. A strange activity peak at the end of a quite long university visit. Not only dice were thrown, I also found my self in a Russian submarine in Denmark, without even pretending. But the strangest situation of them all was standing in a bathroom, staring in the mirror to prepare for the final move towards another man. A man played by my friend Fredrik. I guess it's not as silly as you first think that situations closer - but definitely different - from your normal situation are experienced as more strange. If you work as a driver of dog sleighs in 1934 and someone explains about Yog Sothoth and how unimportant and useless human lives are, that easier to accept than love for another man.

Because of all this aforementioned chaos and turmoil I have participated to a much lesser extent in roleplaying activities the last months. I guess I will sort that out any day soon. At least we will go to Gothcon in Easter, mostly to roleplay. In addition to three scenarios we will also play a chapter in our ongoing Orpheus soap opera.

Keeping up long campaigns seems to be the easiest thing in the world for many gaming groups. For my gaming groups it has always been impossible, and I'm not sure it's a bad thing. But now two really long campaigns (over twenty sessions is really long in my part of the gaming community) are still ongoing. And I'm not certain it's a good thing.

This Orpheus campaign has been quite successfull. I must say I really like the game and the storyline that runs through the books. But it's just too damn long. When hell freezes we will still have two books left. The once so enthusiastic game master now sometimes mumbles about this hatred that is bubbling inside of him. At those moment I avoid his eyes.

Anyway. This weekend we had a very brief Orpheus encounter. We didn't have a real session, but Anna lives in the wrong part of the country these days, and now, while visiting she wanted a short talk with only me.
We stepped out of our bodies, jumped onto my ghost HD and went up to a small hill that served as a making-out place for local teenagers (they have it in American movies, at least). Nagi (Anna) confronted Tadeusz in a way that girls in reality (and in movies) do. "Do we mean to stick together? Will we stick together when we move from here?" with the usual "As long as FBI don't start chasing us again and those hired ghost soldiers don't kill us first."-clause. After apropriate discussion about that Nagi continued with the question about Tadeusz almost beating his former wife to death. He couldn't say much about that, I'm afraid. She answered with letting him experience when two men killed her boyfriend while raping her for five hours.

That scared both him and me. Will we ever be the same?