by Lizzie Stark
nonplayer character: Almost always referred to as NPCs, these characters are the scenery for a larp or tabletop game. NPCs are the monsters, the local barkeep, the strange man with the magic shop, the random policeman. They play any necessary role that is not filled by a PC, or player character. To NPC means to play an NPC role, an action that generally requires an NPC to wear some kind of costume and often to carry a character card similar to but generally less detailed than the ones that player characters carry. (See also: player character)
norms: Dear reader, have you ever worn a strange costume in public on a day other than Halloween? If you answered “no,” then this word describes you. Norms are normal people who are non-gamers. They are sometimes called “mundies” or “mundanes.”
off-game: The Nordic way of saying out-of-game. (See also: in-game/out-of-game)
one-shot: A self-contained game intended to be run only once, usually over the course of four to eight hours. (See also: campaign)
period correct: Used in reenactment to indicate whether a piece of costuming, prop, or method of performing a task is historically accurate.
pervasive game: A game that uses the real world as a backdrop, involving possible interaction with people or places that aren’t an immediate part of the game world. A scavenger hunt is an example of a pervasive game, since during play participants may encounter or interact with people who aren’t playing the game. Some larps are pervasive.
player character: A player character, or PC, is the hero of a tabletop RPG or a larp. PCs go through the plots that the GM has laid out for them, solving puzzles and leveling up, often collaborating with their fellow PCs as part of a “party” that works together.
power gamer: A player who tries to make his or her character as powerful as possible within the confines of the rules. (See also: munchkin, min-maxer)
player versus player: Combat that occurs between players, as opposed to between players and NPCs. PvP, as it is almost always called, is a hot topic among gamers. Many games ban it, because it can cause ill will between players that extends beyond the realm of the game and into real life. The term is sometimes used more generically, to describe any major conflict with lasting impact, not just actual combat, that occurs between players.
Ren Faire: Shorthand for “Renaissance Faire.”
rolling up: In Dungeons & Dragons, players literally “roll up” their characters by tossing predetermined sets of dice in order to generate a list of numbers that will become their characters’ basic statistics. The verbiage has carried over to many role-playing games, including ones that don’t use dice. To roll up a character simply means to create a character’s core statistics according to the game’s rules.
rules lawyer: A player who argues rules technicalities with a GM, sometimes to advance his or her own character, sometimes for the sake of argument, sometimes to prove a point. Rules lawyers typically forsake the spirit of the rule in favor of the wording of a rule and are often, but not always, well-versed in the rules of a game. The term is considered pejorative.
soak: An effect of some armor and weapons in Knight Realms and other games. Equipment that has a soak diminishes the amount of damage the user takes from a given hit. Wear a breastplate with a soak of five, and if a goblin hits you for fifteen damage, you only take ten points of damage—the armor soaks away five points.
Society for Creative Anachronism: A group dedicated to reenacting medieval life, with chapters all across the United States and all over the world. Historical accuracy is very important to the SCA.
steampunk: A genre similar to cyberpunk, but instead of taking fans into the dystopian future, steampunk imagines a world, usually a Victorian-or Edwardian-era one, in which steam power beat out electricity. The symbol of the steampunk subculture is brass goggles or a bare watch gear.
stitch counter/stitch Nazi: These hard-core reenactors are obsessed with the minute historical accuracy of costumes and props. (See also: farb)
Storyteller: Another name for a GM. While the term can generically refer to any GM, in some games the title Storyteller implies that a GM is responsible for some aspect of the game’s plot, as opposed to logistics, decor, or rules mechanics.
stupid o’clock: The hour at which sleep-deprived gamers begin acting ridiculously. Sometimes coincides with beer o’clock, when at a venue that permits alcohol.
support class: Describes characters who are not frontline fighters but who benefit other characters, serving a support function. Examples are bards (who typically buff others), healers, and alchemists (who provide beneficial potions). Sometimes, support-class characters in a larp are demeaned by fighters as “girlfriend-class” or “scenery.”
sword jockey: A boffer larp player who doesn’t care about immersion or building a realistic character, only about killing monsters with his sword; someone who enjoys the sport of boffer fighting. Also known as a “stick jockey.”
tabletop RPG: A pen-and-paper role-playing game, usually played with a variety of dice. Tabletop games, in contrast to larps, take place around a table, with players describing their characters’ actions to the group rather than acting them out. Dungeons & Dragons is the most famous tabletop RPG.
tacticals: Improvised battles that historical reenactors fight in private; fights that don’t mimic a specific historical battle and do not have a predetermined victor.
Travance: Fictional town in which Knight Realms takes place.
total party kill (TPK): Refers to an adventure in which the entire party dies as the result of player stupidity, dumb luck, or a GM who made the monsters too difficult.
war gaming: A type of strategy game played on a terrain map, or miniature terrain, with small figurines, each of which represents a unit.
Whedon, Joss: Our new overlord (Buffy, Firefly, Dollhouse). He deposed George Lucas (Star Wars), who deposed Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek), who deposed J. R. R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings). May have to cage-fight J. J. Abrams (Lost, Fringe) in order to maintain supremacy.
Notes
CHAPTER 3: QUEEN ELIZABETH, LARPER
1. Brian Morton, “Larps and Their Cousins Through the Ages,” Lifelike. Jesper Donnis, Morten Gade, and Line Thorup, eds. (Copenhagen: Projektgruppen KP07, Landsforeningen for Levende Rollespil, 2007), 244–259.
2. Cornelia Emilia Baehrens, The Origin of the Masque, (Groningen, Netherlands: Drukkerij Dijkhuizen & Van Zanten, 1929); see also Suzanne Westfall, “‘A Commonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick’: Household Theater,” from A New History of Early English Drama, John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 39–58.
3. Ibid., 14.
4. George Gascoigne, The Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth Castle (Gascoigne’s Princely Pleasures: with the masque, intended to have been presented before Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle in 1575: with an introductory memoir and notes) (London: J.H. Burn, 1821), 87, note to page 8. Historian Alan Haynes contends that the amount was much less, about £1,700 for the seventeen days, stating, “The notion that he poured out many thousands of pounds is absurd.” Still, that is more than enough for Dudley to have visited the theater more than 56,000 times. Alan Haynes, The White Bear: Robert Dudley, the Elizabethan Earl of Leicester (London: Peter Owen, 1987), 119–120.
5. www.measuringworth.com/ppoweruk, Accessed Nov. 2011.
6. Jeffrey L. Forgeng, Daily Life in Elizabethan England, (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010), 102–104.
7. Westfall, 43.
8. Gascoigne, 80, note to page 5.
9. Ibid., 7; see also David Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry: 1558–1642, (London: W & J Mackay, 1971), 31; see also Robert Langham: A Letter, (Leiden, Netherlands: EJ Brill, 1983), 39–40.
10. Langham, 45.
11. Gascoigne, 24.
12. Bergeron, 34.
13. According to Alan Haynes in The White Bear: Robert Dudley, the Elizabethan Earl of Leicester (London: Peter Owen, 1987), the cancellation was “unexpected and unexplained,”
though Sarah Gristwood blames it on the rain in Elizabeth and Leicester (New York: Viking, 2007).
14. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, vol. 1, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 123; see also Bergeron, 58.
15. Bergeron, 64.
16. Lady of May details from Bergeron, 36. Neptune’s Triumph info from Lauren Shohet, “The Masque in/as Print,” The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers, and Readers in Early Modern England, Martha Straznicky, ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 177.
17. Ian Anstruther, The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of the Eglinton Tournament of 1839, (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1963), 147.
18. Anstruther, 124.
19. Life, March 3, 1941, 102. Accessed June 2011 via GoogleBooks. http://books.google.com/books?id=IUoEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA2 &dq=life+march+3+1941&hl=en&ei=6YniTOriNsWqlAf0zfDaA w&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6 AEwAA#v=onepage&q=life%20march%203%201941&f=false.
20. Daniel Mackay, The Fantasy Role-playing Game, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001). The last sentence in this paragraph is a paraphrase of what MacKay says on page 13.
21. Ibid., 13. See also J. R. Hammond, An H. G. Wells Chronology (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 67.
22. Lawrence Schick, Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-playing Games, (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991), 17.
23. Mackay, 14–15; see also Schick, 18.
24. www.sca.org/officers/chatelain/sca-intro.html, Accessed Nov. 2011.
CHAPTER 6: CLOSETED GAMERS
AND THE SATANIC PANIC
1. William Dear, The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 18.
2. Ibid., 280–281.
3. Lisa Levitt Ryckman, “Murder and Suicide Among Teens Caught Up in Dark World of Satanism,” February 13, 1988, Associated Press.
4. Gary Alan Fine and Jeffrey Victor, “Satanic Tourism: Adolescent Dabblers and Identity Work,” Phi Delta Kappan, September 1, 1994.
5. Mary Elizabeth (Tipper) Gore, Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society, (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1987), 118.
6. Daniel Martin and Gary Alan Fine, “Satanic Cults, Satanic Play: Is ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ a Breeding Ground for the Devil?,” The Satanism Scare, James T. Richardson, Joel Best, and David G. Bromley, eds. (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1991), 109.
CHAPTER 9: LARP AS TRAINING TOOL
1. Stephen Balzac, “Reality from Fantasy: Using Predictive Scenarios to Explore Ethical Dilemmas” from Schrier, Karen, and David Gibson, eds. Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play (IGI Global, 2010), 291–310.
CHAPTER 12: A WEEK IN DENMARK
1. www.danceaffair.com.
2. Doubt (2007) by Fredrik Axelzon and Tobias Wrigstad is available for download at http://jeepen.org/games, Accessed Nov. 2011.
3. www.nordiclarptalks.org, Accessed Nov. 2011.
4. http://fate.laiv.org/in_fate.htm, Accessed Nov. 2011.
5. Peter Munthe-Kaas, “System Danmarc” Nordic Larp, Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, eds. (Stockholm: Fea Livia, 2010), 214.
CHAPTER 13: KNUDEPUNKT BLEW MY MIND
1. Bjarke Pedersen, “Delirium,” Nordic Larp, 288–297.
2. Tor Kjetil Edland, Trine Lise Lindahl, and Margerete Raaum, “Mad About the Boy,” Do Larp: Documentary Writings from KP2011, (Copenhagen: Rollespilsakademiet, 2011), 92–107.
3. http://nordiclarptalks.org/post/576668918/introduction-to-nor-dic-larp, Accessed Nov. 2011.
4. Dogma 99 manifesto is available here: http://fate.laiv.org/dogme99/en/dogma99_en.htm, Accessed Nov. 2011.
5. Turku manifesto by Mike Pohjola is available here: www2.uiah.fi/~mpohjola/turku/manifesto.html, Accessed Nov. 2011.
6. Eirik Fatland, “1942 - Noen a stole pa,” Nordic Larp, 90–99.
7. http://playgroundmagazine.net, Accessed Nov. 2011.
8. Emma Wieslander, “Rules of Engagement,” Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros, eds. (Helsinki: Ropecon ry, 2004), 181–186.
9. Ibid., 183.
10. Jaakko Stenros, “Mellan himmel och hav,” Nordic harp, 158–167.
EPILOGUE
1. www.techspot.com/news/43696-the-us-legally-recognizes-video-games-as-an-art-form.html and http://arts.gov/grants/apply/AIM-presentation.html, Accessed Nov. 2011.
2. http://playgroundrole-playingmagazine.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/u-s-funds-doomsday-scenario, Accessed Nov. 2011.
3. Jaakko Stenros, “Nordic Larp: Theatre, Art, and Game,” Nordic harp, 312, caption.
Resources
FURTHER READING
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010.
Brown, Stuart, with Christopher Vaughn. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Avery, 2009.
Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. Tr. Meyer Barash. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1958.
Fine, Gary Alan. Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Gilsdorf, Ethan. Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2009.
Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War. New York: Vintage, 1999.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Oxon, UK: Routledge, 1949.
Mackay, Daniel. The Fantasy Role-playing Game: A New Performing Art Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001.
Montola, Markus, and Jaakko Stenros. Nordic Larp. Stockholm: Fëa Livia, 2010.
KNUTEBOOKS
Andresen, Lars, Charles Bo Nielsen, Luisa Carbonelli, Jesper Heeboll-Christensen, eds. Do Larp: Documentary Writings from KP2011. Copenhagen: Rollespils Akademiet, 2011. http:// rollespilsakademiet.dk/kpbooks.
Bøckman, Petter, and Ragnhild Hutchinson, eds. Dissecting Larp: Collected Papers for Knutepunkt 2005. Oslo: Knutepunkt 2005, 2005. http://knutepunkt.laiv.org/kp05.
Donnis, Jesper, and Morten Gade Line Thorup, eds. Lifelike. Copenhagen: Projektgruppen KP07, Landsforeningen for Levende Rollespil, 2007. www.liveforum.dk/kp07book.
Fritzon, Thorbiörn, and Tobias Wrigstad, eds. Role, Play, Art: Collected Experiences of Role-playing. Stockholm: Föreningen Knutpunkt, 2006. www.jeepen.org/kpbook.
Henriksen, Thomas Duus, Christian Bierlich, Kasper Friis Hansen, and Valdemar Kolle, eds. Think Larp: Academic Writings from Kp2011. Copenhagen: Rollespils Akademiet, 2011. www.rollespilsakademiet.dk/kpbooks.
Holter, Matthijs, Eirik Fatland, and Even Tomte, eds. Larp, the Universe and Everything. Oslo: Knutepunkt 2009. http://knutepunkt .laiv.org/2009/book.
Gade, Morten, Line Thorup, and Mikkel Sander, eds. As Larp Grows Up: Theory and Methods in Larp. Copenhagen: Projektgruppen KP03, 2003. www.liveforum.dk/kp03_book.
Larsson, Elge, ed. Playing Reality: Articles on Live Action Role-playing. Stockholm: Interacting Arts, 2010. www.knutpunkt.se/book.
Montola, Markus, and Jaakko Stenros, eds. Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing The Imagination. Helsinki: Ropecon ry, 2004. www.ropecon.fi/brap.
____. Playground Worlds: Creating and Evaluating Experiences of Role-playing Games. Helsinki: Ropecon ry, 2008. http://2008.solmukohta.org/index.php/Book/Book.
Raasted, Claus, ed. Talk Larp: Provocative Writings from KP2011. Copenhagen: Rollespils Akademiet, 2011. www.rollespilsakademiet.dk/kpbooks.
US-BASED LARP GROUPS
Camp HalfBlood—http://web.mac.com/camphalfblood/Camphalfblood.com
Dagorhir—www.dagorhir.com
Dystopia Rising—www.dystopiarising.com
Knight Realms—www.knightrealms.com
LAIRE—www.laire.com
NERO—www.nerolarp.com
One World By Night—http://oneworldbynight.org
CONVENTIONS
Do
uble Exposure (runs DEXCON and DREAMATION)—www.dexposure.com
Fastaval—www.fastaval.dk
Intercon—http://intercon.larpaweb.net
Lunacon—www.lunacon.org
Wyrd Con—www.wyrdcon.com
Solmukohta—www.solmukohta.org
OTHER RESOURCES
Dance Affair—www.danceaffair.org
Fëa Livia—www.fealivia.se
The Forge Forums—www.indie-rpgs.com/forge
International Journal of Role-play—http://journalofrole-playing.org
Jeep or Vi Aker Jeep (We Go by Jeep)—http://jeepen.org
LARP Alliance—www.larpalliance.net
LARPA—www.larpaweb.net
Nordic Larp—http://nordiclarp.wordpress.com
Nordic Larp Talks—http://nordiclarptalks.org
RPG.net—www.rpg.net
RPGA—www.wizards.com/rpga
Shade’s LARP List—www.larplist.com/list.php
ADDITIONAL RESEARCH SOURCES CONSULTED
Anglo, Sydney. Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Baker, Simon, and Hillary Hinds, eds. The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama. London: Routledge, 2003.
Bergeron, David M. Practicing Renaissance Scholarship. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000.
Fine, Gary Alan. Shared Fantasy: Role-playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Haynes, Alan. The White Bear: Robert Dudley, the Elizabethan Earl of Leicester. London: Peter Owen, 1987.
Hollander, John. An Entertainment for Elizabeth: English Literary Renaissance Monographs, vol. 1. Storrs, CT: University of Connecticut, 1972.
Kipling, Gordon. “Wonderfull Spectacles: Theater and Civic Culture.” From A New History of Early English Drama. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 153-171.
Palmer, Daryl W. Hospitable Performances: Dramatic Genre and Cultural Practices in Early Modern England. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1992.