You'd have to have either been (a) living under a rock, or (b) actually have a life outside of my sphere of existence, not to have heard me banging out about Nordic Larp over the last 18 months. In short, its amazing and it's added so much to my practice of late, it's quite hard to know where to start?
I think it's fair to say the lifeblood of Nordic Larp, and the key distinction between it and 'boffer' larps, are the use of Pre-Larp workshops. Upon discovery of which, I felt like Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This community has got immersion, participation, alibi and sensitivity to players down to an extremely refined, streamlined system which I have been poaching from to my hearts content.
Knutpunkt is an annual Nordic Larp convention which takes place in one of a few rotating Scandinavian countries. It's where my adventure all began, and is bar none the highest caliber of Nordic Larp gathering in the world, academics, games players, writers you name it. It's here. This is where the edge gets sharpened every year, and I count myself as extremely proud to have run my Larp 'I know you are but what am I?' here in 2014. If you wanna know more visit their excellent site www.http://knutpunkt.org, and then join us and the growing British contingent for Knutpunkt 2015 in Denmark.
I used many of these newly acquired pre-larp workshops in the methodology behind my recent Jerwood Open Forest show. They were extremely useful in devising new languages, rituals, cultures and characters, all of which we did whilst living in Sherwood Forest for 8 days.
Recently I've been trying to cultivate a Nordic Larp scene here in London. As of yet, the UK Larp scene is more dedicated to 'boffer' larps and 'freeform' games. the Nordic scene is almost non-existent, so bit by but, larp by larp I'm doing my bit to change this. The first step down the Nordic Path to glory being an event I ran at Artsadmin called 'Playing to Lose'. This went down brilliantly and introduced a good sized group to new forms of Larping.
https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/events/3458
The workshop Handbook is about as a good place as any to start if your interested in finding out more.
You should also definitely visit the following sites, these people (demigods) are where its at with Nordic Larp. So much excellent information and near limitless resources for Larpers, artists, performers, teachers and academics.
http://norper.wordpress.com/2014/04/01/nordic-larp-primer/
http://lizziestark.com/
http://petterkarlsson.se/
http://www.munthe-kaas.dk/
http://www.alibisforinteraction.se/blog/
https://www.youtube.com/user/nordiclarptalks
Once you've been there, I suggest you pick up or download 'Larp's from the Factory'. A staggeringly great collection of Nordic Larp's each playable between 2-6 hrs with relatively straightforward playability for the complete Larp newb. I'm currently working my way through 6 of them at The Proud Archivist in London, swing by if you in town.
