As you may have noticed, I haven’t been able to post so much on the blog lately. This is because I’ve had one of the busiest summers and falls of my life. In addition to visiting several conventions this summer–such as Gen Con, where I did some guest of honor duties, I also spent six weeks at an artists’ colony, edited two books, and began work on three freeform games as well as working on my main project, the book PANDORA’S DNA, which is very nearly due. I will be back to blogging in due course, as soon as the manuscript is in.

In the meantime, here are a things that are rocking my larp world right now.

• The Norwegian Larp Factory book project, a collection of 22 larp brilliant larp scripts, written for between 8 and 30 players, and which take up about an evening of time. This book is full of amazing design, from relationship dramas to murder mysteries, teen dramas, and more formal experiments, and will have an accompanying website containing supporting materials and video demos of all workshop and game techniques used. Since I helped edit the tome, I realize this is a little like your mother telling you you’re smart, but seriously: I am super excited about the games in this book. Although you can read teasers over at the book’s website, really what you should do is visit our Indie Gogo page and pre-order a copy.
• Play the Cards by Trine Lise Lindahl, Frida Sofie Jensen and Tyra Larsdatter Grasmo is a great teen drama larp from said book project. It sorts the players into four cliques, each represented by a suit of playing cards. The hearts are the popular girls, the spades are the jocks, the clubs the alterna-kids and the diamonds are the nerds. You wear your clique and status within it on your chest. Last Saturday, Emma Leigh Waldron, Aaron Trammell and I organized this game for about thirty players through our local collective the Highland Park Players. In the morning we had rousing rounds of J. Tuomas Harviainen’s game The Tribunal, and Trine Lise Lindahl, Elin Nilsen and Anna Westerling’s game Summer Lovin’. Thanks to everyone who came and played, to Emma and Aaron, who are always wonderful co-organizers, and to player Rachel Walton, who made a killer relationship map for the game.
• Before/After Silence by Mathijs Holter and Fredrik Hossman, another larp from the book project that is a formal experiment in silence and sound, gets a nice write-up from Aaron Trammell today over on the Sound Studies Blog.
• Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex in Larp But Were Afraid to Ask. Some of our wonderful Texas cohorts made an amusing video about sex in larp. Go watch it — this post will keep!
• In case you missed it, there’s a beautiful documentation book for Hanne Grasmo and Tor Kjetil Edland’s Just a Little Lovin’, a larp about the summer AIDS came to New York City. The larp has been run several times, in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. I believe this lovely full-color tome hails from the Danish run, and contains guidelines for putting up new additional runs.
• Open call for submissions for this year’s Knutebook.
• In December, the Highland Park Players are planning to run another day of games, probably a play-test of my new larpy venture called In Residency, about life at an artists’ colony, and with any lucky, something else in the morning too.
• French larper Thomas Be has a fascinating post about what it was like to play a woman in the larp Mad About the Boy, about the world after all the men die. I helped organize the US run of this game about a year ago–we only had the resources to organize an all-lady run, but the recent Swedish team organized both all-lady and mixed gender runs.
• The first-ever Palestinian Larp Festival ran this weekend, with local and Nordic participants. The Norwegian team has been blogging about their experiences traveling in Palestine and at the convention. Worth a read.

This year, I’m lucky enough that I’m getting to visit Nordica a second time. At the end of October I head to Grenselandet, a Norwegian chamber larp festival, and then to the inaugural Stockholm Scenario Festival, a new freeform convention in Sweden, though unfortunately this means I will miss one of my favorite US conventions, Metatopia. I’m bringing The Curse,
my game about hereditary breast cancer, which has also found a place in the recently-ended and thought provoking Boob Jam, a collection of digital and analogue games about breasts, from the non-straight-male-gaze perspective.

Catch you all after my book deadline, when I’ll write about my adventures in Norway and Sweden!