Diary of a LARPoHolic

As all roleplayer stories, it began with Dungeons and Dragons. Except, it didn't. It began with Tolkien.

I was 14. Nobody at the Intercon Science Fiction convention understood why I hadn't read Tolkien yet. So I took the tram to Avalon, the Mecca of Oslo gamers and sci-fi fans, and bought myself a flimsy paperback copy of the Lord of the Rings. I read, non-stop, for the remainder of the convention, missing out of several films I had wanted to see and a speach by Larry Niven.

Lord of the Rings was a revelation, followed by new revelations in "the Silmarillion" and later in the corpus of historical mythology Tolkien drew his inspiration from.

I began gamesmastering D&D at 15 because there wasn't any more Tolkien to read. For a few years, I would play tabletop roleplaying games at least once a week. At 17, as a member of the Vingulmork gamer society, I become involved in writing modules and organising conventions. NecromiCon, devoted to the 'gothic horror genre' and HobCon, 'the Hobbit Convention', both became personal passions.

I would like to pretend I was always a genre critic and innovationist, but that would simply not be true. I dived, head-first, into the clichés of roleplaying, and revelled in dungeoncrawls, weird dice, and rules lawyerisms. It was only after playing Rolemaster for one week entirely that I realised I had spent more time consulting tables and rulebooks than actually playing the game, that my views started changing.

At first, I realised I could do without game mechanics. Then I began subtracting more and more of existing game structures and subsituting them for my own. Unbeknowest to me, the same experience was made by many other gamesmasters at the time.

Then I discovered LARP.

My first LARP, Nosferatu 1, was a disappointment. Mostly, I now understand, because I had been (correctly) labelled "tabletop geek" by the organisers an hence (incorrectly) ignored in their development of the game. It was only thanks to Cy-tech I continued LARPing. The cy-tech organisers had (incorrectly) labelled me a Satanist, and hence (correctly) given me the character of a temple master in a psedo-voodoun cult. The character wasn't what made the game great, neither were the efforts of the organisers - it was the atmosphere of the location, an abandoned industrial complex, that made this one of the most memorable events in Oslo LARP history.

I thought : We had fun this time. Maybe attend a LARP or two more. Not a full-time hobby, though, just once a year.