Welcome back! I know I said last time that this would be the Big Larp Update. But, before we can get into my week at Gimle, there’s a weekend in Stockholm that I can’t ignore or I would be leaving out my new best friend in Stockholm, Trouble! She is so very baby. ❤
As you can probably guess, I started missing my pets and made the surprise discovery that there’s a cat café near my housing, which wasn’t the sort of coincidence I was about to pass up!
The rest of the weekend was less remarkable—mostly just chores and preparing for five days’ camping. I made the last-minute discovery that the tents you can rent from the larp’s organizers are just the dubiously-waterproof top of a tent with no bottom, and consequently had to travel rather further afield than expected to find an IKEA where I could buy a waterproof tarp. Unnecessary? Maybe a little. But if it gets rainy (very possible), guess who won’t be waking up in a puddle? This guy! And that would be miserable, so I think it’s worth it.
Plus, the annoyingly distant IKEA I had to go to ended up being the ✨oldest IKEA in the world✨, so I’m writing the whole trip off as successful tourism and a good use of time! It was definitely not so crowded with coughing people that I wanted to bite someone. Tourism. Good use of time. Definitely.
Work week 5 (such as it was when it was only Monday and Tuesday) consisted mostly of me mercilessly bothering my second-best friend in Stockholm, Erik from IT, about a series of way more minor tech problems than bear mentioning. But, at least I finally had a project and a plan for what to do with the rest of my summer, which is more than could be said for the first four weeks of my nine-week program here, so that was something. Progress, even!
I ended the week with remote server access (most of the time) and a functioning virtual environment setup (mostly), ready to start trying to generate interesting-looking diagrams and get a bit of data by the end of Week 6 so I would have something to submit with my abstract for the bioengineering conference that my research program encourages us to attend.
OK, enough waiting. On to what you’ve really been waiting for: the Nordic LARP Experience™!
Since I ended up happy with my character playlist for this LARP for once in my life, have a link in case you want the ~fancy multimedia version~ of this review.
Getting to site went smoothly, thankfully. I took the high-speed train to Gothenburg, which was a good experience on the whole! Hooray for Swedish public transit (at least in the summer, I hear it gets a little less reliable once it gets snowier and icier in the winter, but that’s not my problem.)
This wasn’t the most aesthetically pleasing example, but I got to see some pretty sights out the window, including some sort of old castle that was unfortunately on the other side of the train so that I couldn’t get a picture of it without creepily aiming a camera at my unsuspecting fellow passengers across the aisle.
Since I had to catch an early train to make it out to the LARP site in good time, I pre-ordered the kid’s pancake breakfast, which was…predictably mediocre, I guess. Far from the best Thursday pancakes I’ve ever had in Sweden. Though admittedly I had them on a Wednesday, so maybe I should just stick to eating pancakes on the right day. I liked that the meal came with a little picture book about the train line’s mascot—I had to use google translate to read it, but it was nice that they included something to do on the train ride.
Once I made it to Gothenburg, it was another two hours’ bus ride north and a short ride by car to site. Since the whole area of the LARP was apparently only ever used for this LARP game once a year, they had quite a few permanent and semi-permanent genre structures built. The game space was a pretty big area of forest—most of the game happened in the most central, populated region, which was probably around the same size as the area of Kberg from the front gate to the Bronze Leaf.
The most luxurious aspect of the site was that there were three taverns where you could buy meals for real money, run by people who were semi-in character but spent the whole five days pretty much just working the tavern. I was very grateful for the readily available food, especially since I didn’t bring my giant Twin Mask cooler to Sweden with me!
My personal camping setup was in the in-character space for my faction in a little conical canvas tent, instead of my usual OOC camping at LARP. I thought about sleeping OOC, but the organizers were renting out the canvas tents, and that let me avoid having to arrange my own tent from the Friditsbanken + lug it through a six–seven hour journey from Stockholm. Camping IC was a fun experience, on the whole, since I could just get out of my tent and immediately be in the gamespace, or duck into it in the middle of the day without needing to trek all the way out of the gamespace to the OOC camping area. Admittedly, it did make middle-of-the-night bathroom trips more annoying since I couldn’t just wander around the gamespace in my very modern pajamas, but I think the benefits outweighed the drawbacks.
It did not, in fact, end up raining, by the way, but I was still glad to have my IKEA tarp to lay out in one half of the tent (covered by a sheet for genre-ness) to make a clean-ish sleeping area. Also, I now have vastly more respect for the people who use these tents at TM, given how many stakes they require to stay stable + how difficult it is to get stakes into the ground at Kberg.
In terms of how Gimle compared from Twin Mask and the other SoCal larps I’ve been to: it was similar in some ways, very different in others, but a good experience for what it was trying to do, I would say. Probably the most immediately obvious change was that there were no age or species restrictions, so there were a couple infants with parents, quite a few elementary–high school age kids, and one very cute English bulldog running around.
Rules-wise, Gimle was super light, with most of the rules/mechanics being just for OOC safety and comfort. Fighting was just ‘you have 3–6 health depending on how much armor you’re wearing, swords hit for one and bows for two’. If you got downed to 0 health, you were grievously injured, but by default you just had to wait an hour to heal a bit or see a medic; there was no death mechanic, and the only time you would die is if you decided OOC that you wanted your character to die. Only one PC died the whole weekend that I heard of, as a ritual sacrifice that was pretty clearly planned OOC in advance. There was no skill system or similar mechanics, and there were only four spells in the entire game that each took significant IC work to learn and could only be cast once or twice each per 12. There was also no materials or crafting system, and while there were a couple of unique ‘artifacts’ floating around the gamespace with their own per-12 effects, most people went the whole game without using or being affected by them.
Ritual magic existed, but it was an entirely narrative thing without any real mechanics. If some people wanted magic done outside the scope of the four spells (which were all minor combat or healing, nothing complicated or long-term), they would go to the mage/scholar faction and present their problem, and whichever members of the faction happened to be around the camp at that point would just have to come up with ~something ritual magic-y~ to do on the fly, and then it would be up to everyone to decide in the moment OOC whether they wanted to play the scene as if the magic worked or didn’t, and finish the scene accordingly. It was all very loosey-goosey, which surprised me at first, but once I knew to turn off my TM/D&D mechanics brain and turn on my narrative-focused rules-light TTRPG brain, I enjoyed it.
The other difference with wide-reaching impacts was a much more robust theft system at Gimle than at TM, especially in the absence of any kind of mechanical divination to trace thieves and discourage spur-of-the-moment theft. Only specific items marked in red tape could be stolen—artifacts and a bunch of random knick-knacks like cups and candlesticks with no mechanical value, mostly—but there were enough sticky-fingered characters floating around that all of them were circulating constantly, and every stealable item probably got stolen, sold to someone else, then re-stolen by another thief at least twice a day, or more if it was an artifact with any mechanical value. Because the food economy at the taverns functioned in real money divorced from the rest of the IC economy, buying random stolen knick-knacks or hiring other players to do things for you were the main drivers of IC money circulation. As a result, I don’t think I ever spent any IC money in all 5 days—you weren’t going to be able to do anything really meaningful with it unless you had ridiculous amounts of money, which wasn’t something I was going to achieve as a first-time player.
However, all those differences felt secondary to one change that made the biggest impact on my experience: there was basically no top-down plot coming from organizers. Technically, there was some game-wide plotline of an empire without any PC characters sniffing around the edges of some of the other nations with active player bases, but I saw Literally No Evidence of that happening until the post-game evaluation form asked me to rate my experience with it as a plotline. There were NPCs, but they only showed up maybe once a day all in a big group to do a singular scene in a big field—and those were more of a show to watch than something for players to engage with in the sense I’m used to at SoCal LARPs.
So, most of the plot that happened was totally player-driven; the kingdom/empire/tribal factions had political stuff going on that was entirely initiated and carried out by players deciding to make moves (unlike TM, PCs could come in as major political figures like queens and jarls, which enabled this sort of player-run political gameplay). As a member of the politically-neutral scholar group, though, I was involved in precisely None of that sort of plot besides running away to my camp whenever some party or other turned into a bloodbath of a political assassination.
My group’s, the Academy’s, main IC plotline was trying to collect records of other groups’ stories, cultures, and knowledge to build a library. Like the political plot, though, I think that goal came entirely from the guy playing the Rector of the Academy deciding it would be an interesting objective and telling all of us to work on it. For lack of much else to do, I leaned in as hard as I could and ended up playing more of an archivist than the diviner I’d intended to be, so my weekend was largely organizing old scrolls and materials that had all been shoved haphazardly into a cupboard over the course of 9 years of annual games, doing spooky fantasy journalling with quill pens and fancy paper, and sitting in the Academy camp waiting for other people to wander through with questions or wanting help with magic.
In the end, I felt more like I was playing side character or NPC in everyone else’s stories than a main character with big goals/motivations in the world in my own right, but that wasn’t a bad thing. Being a mildly creepy diviner-slash-librarian in the woods is pretty fun, as it turns out, and it was nice to take LARP slowly for once in my life. As Rue at Twin Mask, or Thea at Dial of Ruin, I’m always kind of in ‘action mode’ attending meetings, putting out fires—sometimes literally—working on plot, selling candies, looking for people. The same is even truer for 5CRPGA LARPs that only last a couple hours; I’m constantly either pursuing the plot as much as possible as a player or working to pull in players and make sure I get in all my intended plot beats/lore drops as an NPC. And I love those experiences, don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t want to spend all my time people-watching and writing at SoCal LARPs where there are bigger things to do. But it was also kind of fun to be able to live more slowly as my character at a LARP where the closest thing I got to plot was when people showed up to my camp wanting to learn magic and I had to make up little quests to send them on.
On my way home at the recommendation of a friend I met during the game, I stopped at a sausage place in the train station for what I can only imagine must be a Swedish invention since it involves copious amounts of fairly bland carbohydrates topped with mustard: a grilled frankfurter with mashed potatoes.
I accidentally overturned it onto the countertop as I was setting it down to eat it, which is why it looks so squashed, but it was pretty tasty anyway! I might have been a little biased by the fact that the LARP organizers lied about there being breakfast available on Sunday so that the only things I’d eaten before this food (this was at about 3pm, mind you) were a mini bag of garden salsa chips, a fortune cookie from the Hoch, and a pre-packaged blondie about the size of my thumb, all variously old and squashed from having been languishing in my cloak pocket for who knows how long. But this is why I keep random snacks in my pockets at all times—you never know when they’ll save you!
The whole trip back was a bit more fraught than the one to site. I nearly caught the wrong bus to Gothenburg which would have made me miss my train (thank you unironically, lack of breakfast, for making me leave site three hours earlier than planned in search of food), and my train got delayed by about two hours first because of mechanical problems and then because of people on the train tracks. But, the train didn’t get cancelled outright, and eventually we got underway, which meant I got to try my second kid’s train meal: meatballs!
A bit disappointingly, there were neither the traditional peas nor lingonberry jam. But, the meatballs were heated through, which was a win compared to last time, and the bland pasta + over-salted meatballs balanced out if you ate them together to be—if not well-seasoned—at least pretty edible, so I’m counting that as a win. I even got a different mini picture book than last time, which was exciting!
All in all, I made it home only mildly scathed by a sprained ankle from running away from orcs on an uneven trail on Friday. I…definitely didn’t need to run that fast even IC—thank you, Twin Mask, for apparently giving me an instinct to book it away from anyone threatening who also has extremely involved makeup and costuming—but we’re going to say it’s because I was just so committed to the bit. I’ll feel less silly that way.
Final thoughts on the Nordic LARP Experience™: very different from what I’m used to, good to have experienced, and probably something I would do again, but not going to replace SoCal LARPing for me any time soon.
See you all next week for somewhat less groundbreaking updates as I get ready to go to Amsterdam in two week’s time!
Lyra Cromwell 