
Oh my, what an exciting weekend taping På spåret in Gothburg! I obviously can’t say anything about the result, but I will say this: in the first programme I’m in, the host mentions that I’m a role-player, and I totally own it (NERD PRIDE!) – and then go on to fail the one question that every fantasy larper in Sweden knows the answer to… Whoops.
I really can’t say whether Marcus Birro and I are satisfyingly televisual together, it’s too weirdly intense to sit inside that box. We had great fun though (and a big part of that is that the hosts and all the other contestants were such hilarious people). But what I can say is that the new host and judge work really, really well both together and with the concept of the show, and that the new house band Augustifamiljen is brilliant. If there was a CD on sale with the musical questions, I would totally buy it. The På spåret season starts on December 4th, my episodes are on December 11th and January 22nd.
Meanwhile, in Finland, in Finnish, I have premiered a new blog under the auspices of City-lehti. I will be writing about books and book-related phenomena once or twice a week. Check it out!
Now, the most exciting event of last week was easily my visit to the Role-Playing Camp organised by Camelot, the Arthurian/RPG youth club of the Swedish Church. The camps are organized twice each year and one of the highlights is a short larp, this year an H.P. Lovecraft-themed one called Skuggor över Finnåker (Shadows over Finnåker). The Swedish Church is obviously pretty liberal; I would not expect to see an ordained minister of, say, the Anglican church participating in a fictional occult ritual. Skuggor was a pretty tight little game. I had the pleasure of playing it twice and immediately lobbied for it to be produced again in conjunction with the big conventions next year – here’s hopin’.
Now, the reason I made the trek to Arboga to begin with was that I had been invited to give a talk to the camp. I called it 12 Mind-Blowing LARP Experiences, and it was a short introduction to key games, ideas and methods in the Nordic Larp tradition (it was in English, since one of the campers was Hungarian). The talk can be viewed as a sort of very, very, distant first draft of the Nordic Larp book (edited by the brilliant Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola) that I have been asked to write the introduction of, and some super exciting things are happening in this field next year. Watch this space!
(In the above picture I wait for the Lovecraft game to begin together with larpwright Teresa Axner, who also happens to be one of my Weird Science colleagues. We are already in costume as the misses Linder and Lampa, and would spend the next several hours being really scared of cultists in the forest. I had not planned on staying, so my costume is symbolic – the Hilfiger logo on my sweater is obscured by my ordinary winter coat. In the background, younger participants. Photo by Anna-Karin Linder).