The Dream of a King and other tales

– The scenarios competing in the Danish roleplaying convention Fastaval are reputed to be among the best in the world, yet they’re rarely played outside Denmark because they’re mostly in Danish, says editor Juhana Pettersson.

Unelma Keltaisesta kuninkaasta ja muita tanskalaisia roolipelejä (The Dream of a King in Yellow and other Danish roleplaying games) is a collection of Fastaval scenarios translated into Finnish. It’s the first time Fastaval scenarios have been published
as a collection in any foreign language.

Web: Book page (In Finnish, English with Google Translate).
Illustration: By Joel Sammallahti, from the cover of the book, based on the game Arken by Alex Uth

Article by Ole Peder Giæver

Leaving Mundania

Keep your eyes out for the tentatively-titled Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role Playing Games, American journalist Lizzie Stark’s account of the stateside larp scene. The book, which is aimed at a mainstream audience, takes readers inside long-running convention and boffer larps in the US, and explains terminology, history, and game mechanics. She profiles many gamers, from the long-haired Republican who runs one of the eastern seaboard’s most successful boffer campaigns, to a retired military man and devoted larper whose every hobby involves war. Due out from Chicago Review Press in spring 2012.

Leaving Mundania tells the story of adults who put on costumes, develop personas, and interact with other characters over the course of hours or days as part of a larp, or live action roleplaying game. A larp is a hybrid of games like Dungeons & Dragons, historical reenactment, fandom, and good old fashioned pretend; it’s well-organized make believe for grownups.This diverse subculture is just beginning to enter the mainstream imagination in America.

Leaving Mundania looks at the hobby from a variety of angles, from its history in the pageantry of Tudor England to its present as a training tool for the US military. I profile a diverse range of larpers, from a dad who ran his kids through nightly D & D mods with morals instead of reading them bedtime stories, to a police detective terrified his office will discover his hobby. Along the way, I duel foes with foam-padded weapons, let the demon Cthulhu destroy my parents’ beach house, and survive an existential awakening brought on by Scandinavia’s avant-garde larp scene.

Web: Leaving Mundania
Photo: Kyle Ober, from Knight Realms which Lizzie recently visited

Article by Ole Peder Giæver

Nordic Larp Book

The Nordic Larp anthology was released in December, and contains 29 different stories about larps that have been held in the Nordic countries the past 15 years.

– The vision of the book was to package the Nordic Larp tradition in a way that communicates the wonder of our way of larping to someone who has never tried it, says Jaakko Stenros, one of the editors.

Classics such as En stilla middag, Europa, Panopticorp, 1942 and Mellan himmel och hav are amongst the games covered.

– We are hoping that in sixty years someone will discover it from the depths of the library of the aesthetics department, and be inspired by it.

The book is 300 pages, has 250 photos, and is printed in full color.

– A central challenge, with any work that tries to capture larp, is that it is ephemeral and subjective. To truly understand it you need to participate, and even then there are as many stories as there are players. We tried to tackle this problem by having numerous voices and points of view in the book, says Stenros.

Webshop: Fëa Livia
Web: Nordi Larp Book

You can also watch a 30 min talkshow about the book made by the Nordic Larp Talks team during the release parties of the book in December.

Photo: Olle Sahlin

Article by Ole Peder Giæver