One of the things I feel obligated to state early in the life of this blog, and will probably feel the need to link back to at intervals, is that when I reference Nordic LARP, I’m very specifically referencing their arthaus/experimental/weird traditions.

I am aware that there is a great volume of LARP in the Nordic zone that is pretty solidly analogous to the UK tradition.  Fantasy LARPS, Vampire/World of Darkness LARPs are all represented there, and are the sort of thing that a UK player would find pretty broadly similar to our own tradition.  I’m also aware that Nordic LARP is not some monolith entity across Scandinavia and Finland – that each of of the various countries have their own styles, traditions, and preferences in their “normal” LARP.  I’m not trying to homogenise these cultures, or suggest that the kid of LARPs I’m likely to wind up talking about are the only ones played in those countries.

Nor am I seeking to suggest that Nordic LARP is only played in Nordic countries – I’m also aware that there are plenty of other countries in Europe where LARPs in the Nordic tradition are played.

Effectively, I’m using the term “Nordic” in the sense it is used on the Nordic LARP wiki, and in the marvellous book “Nordic LARP“.  Which is to say that I’m looking at LARPs that treat the form as worthy of analysis, debate and experimentation, that make some nods of the head toward terms like “creative vision” and “doing something a bit different”.  (One might also add “prizes immersion” to that list, although I get the sense that’s more variable, depending on the goals of each specific LARP.)

Nordic LARPs (in the sense that I’m intending to reference them in) also tend to have some or all of the following characteristics: they’re one-off events (even if they are run more than once, it is simply the same game being run multiple times), they feature characters originated by the organisers (I’m not sure how I feel about the term “Larpwright” that seems to be popular in the Nordic scene, but then I don’t like the term “Storyteller” that White Wolf have been using for two decades now, so it may just be me) rather than the players, and they’re often short (running for hours, rather than days), and they place high value on appropriate costume and scenery.  None of these are always true – indeed, there are a body of “classic” Nordic LARPS that are weekend long events, and there is an great corpus of LARPS that are designed to be played in black-box theatre spaces, but it’s a reasonable set of basic characteristics.