This post is about my experiences at Stockholm Scenario Festival 2024, “A festival for free form role playing games, short larps, and other kinds of shorter participatory storytelling.”

This past year I have been wondering how little of a rules system a game could have and still be fun to play for me. What is it like to free form role play? And how is it done? I went to Stockholm Scenario Festival to learn.

There were also some games listed on the SSF web site categorized as “tabletop” and I was curious to see if these would be like the TTRPGs I knew or something completely different with new mechanics and play styles.

How it generally works

The games are called scenarios, each of which will usually have a document with instructions for how to play and any back story and character profiles. All sessions are led by game masters, but their role varies a lot from one scenario to the other.

The larps at SSF are of the type called “chamber larp” meaning that they take place in a single room. No costumes were used and most games had no props, so there was some mime artistry going on.

Midlife Blues

https://scenariofestival.se/scenarios-2024/midlife-blues-weird-sisters/
In this game we explored the midlife crises of the twin sisters Zoe and Clio who are witches in an urban fantasy setting. We started with taking turns describing details in the respective homes of the sisters, defining something about their lifestyles while also simultaneously learning the mechanics for playing scenes.

In a given scene one player was responsible for narrating what a sister was thinking (inner witch), and another for what she was saying (outer witch), in that order. This gives the outer witch player the opportunity to either speak the witch’s mind or hide the witch’s feelings. We did some variations of this in play and it was fun. I always thought I wouldn’t like sharing control of a character within a game, let alone in a scene, but apparently I do.

We could pick scenes to play out from a prewritten list, each with a short prompt about who was there and why. For example there was a scene in a café were Zoe and Clio are planning how to celebrate their 35th birthday together. But players got free rein to describe the details of the environments in a given scene (weather, lighting, decoration, etc.), and what characters said and thought. The sisters are seated and involved in a conversation for the entirety of every scene except the final scene. This did not impair our ability to impact the sisters’ lives as we could establish things in conversation which would clearly have repercussions down the line. Also we could introduce things that happened between scenes by “thinking” or speaking about them.

For example Clio had a scene with a vampire that ended with them being physically intimate. In the next scene where the sisters were planning their 40th birthday party the Inner Clio player said “How am I going to tell Zoe that I’m dating a vampire now? What is she going to think?” which established that Zoe’s encounter with the vampire had lead to a long term relationship.

Most games I have played in the past did not have a clear turn order for dialogue or out-of-combat actions. This could lead to a sort of free-for-all where the person who spoke first or most insistently would get to determine what happened next in the game. I liked that the strict turn order for everything in Midlife Blues ensured that people were listening properly to each other instead of trying to get the cool thing they came up with into the fiction. I came up with something I thought was cool when it wasn’t my turn twice in the early game. Then I realized that when it was my turn my idea had already become irrelevant because of the other players’ input, so I stopped doing that and just listened until it was my turn.

Schmiss

https://scenariofestival.se/scenarios-2024/schmiss/
A game dealing with tough themes about toxic masculinity and power dynamics. We did a mix of theater of the mind and live action. Player characters are teenage boys in a paramilitary nationalist order, kind of a macho warrior cult. The teens are left in charge of the order’s headquarters, a large villa, when the adults go off to fight in The Great War. But it turns out the leader of the order left something strange behind, which escalates conflict and inner turmoil among the boys.

This was the first game were I did some larp scenes and it was actually uncomfortable sometimes since there were so many negative emotions being expressed. The other players acted out their rage, contempt and depression convincingly enough. It’s not the same as being in a theater audience. When it’s expressed directly at you, from a distance of 1-3 feet, it hits differently. But the boys met their end as brothers, choosing loyalty to each other and the dream they had lived over obedience to the order. This reconciliation between the characters also dissipated most of the negative emotions for me.

Even so, I’m not sure I want to participate in a larp which such volatile themes again.

The Weather Report

https://scenariofestival.se/scenarios-2024/the-weather-report/
This scenario is about personal and interpersonal problems in a family, explored over the course of decades at a recurring family gathering. Our family gathering was the impulsive grandmother Clara’s birthday. Other characters were her daughter Francis (martyr), daughter in law Lucy (can’t remember her trait) and the two teen grandsons Nick (irresponsible) and Thomas (spoiled).

The title refers to the avoidant behavior where people “talk about the weather” rather than have uncomfortable conversations about sensitive matters. Every round began with taking turns choosing one secret from a premade set which would be about our character. Then we took turns picking which secret our character would have. That part was hidden information which may be revealed later in play. Each subsequent round had bigger, more shocking secrets to choose from, ramping up the drama. Old secrets from previous rounds could also surface much later in the game.

For example one secret read “I stole money from _‘s wallet several times”. Clara’s player wrote “Clara” in the blank space. I then picked the secret for my character Nick, who confessed it to his mother Clara four rounds later during an emotional moment of bonding.

After the business with the secrets was sorted the larp part of the round would begin. A larp round lasted for a set number of minutes (10 minutes I think?) and was timed by the game master, who did not participate in the larp at all. The game master was basically there to instruct us and help us play the game properly.

The room was often quite lively as we had five characters interacting with each other simultaneously, sometimes all around the table having parallel conversations and at other times going off in pairs or threes to confide about something. In such conditions it was not possible for any one player to keep track of everything that was happening between all the characters. For example Thomas might share a secret with Lucy but not want Clara and Nick to find out. And in practice that meant that Clara’s and Nick’s players also wouldn’t find out. This meant that when a secret came out it was almost as shocking to the players as it was for the characters, which made things exciting.

In the last couple rounds stakes were introduced that threatened to tear the family apart, and after a few shocking twists and turns (as all the last big secrets were revealed) that is exactly what happened. Relationships between characters changed a lot throughout the game with betrayal, redemption, forgiveness and disownment. It was all very fun and engaging.

The Bible and the Gun

https://scenariofestival.se/scenarios-2024/the-bible-and-the-gun/
An experimental larp based on improvisation with two props: the titular bible and gun. We started with three rules:

• A stop signal for players: if you want someone to stop doing what they are doing, tap like when submitting in martial arts, either on yourself or on them
• The game master decides when a scene starts and stops
• Two people start play with a prop each, distributed by the game master

The first two rounds were quite chaotic as people immediately started improvising with each other regardless of whether they had a prop or not. This meant there were several simultaneous “scenarios” or threads of action going on until the prop holders asserted themselves and merged the other threads into their own by being loud, insistent and waving their gun or bible at people.
In the third round a new rule added:

• The people without props must remain passive until the prop holders have started the scene with some concept, and then improvise from that

This reduced the chaos a lot and I felt the play was of higher quality, with people playing off each other more as a collective rather than dividing into cliques pulling in different directions.

Yet another rule added in round four reduced the initial confusion further:

• Both the bible and the gun are handed to one person, and everyone else has to wait for this individual’s lead.

The final variation of the experiment was that the bible and gun are both placed in the middle of the room, and whoever comes up with an idea first gets to grab one of the props and start the larp. The other prop is removed from play entirely. This worked well for shorter rounds, which we did a few of.

My takeaway from this experiment is that focusing on one person’s idea and then cascading from that, as the other players react to it, leads to more satisfying play than starting by having multiple people doing their own thing and hoping it all meshes together in the end.

Who I Was

https://scenariofestival.se/scenarios-2024/who-i-was/
“This is a larp for sharp improvisation, affirmation, clearness and initiative.” The premise is that someone have just died and arrived in a sort of afterlife, where they rediscover their memories of life and find out who they are, how they lived, what people were important to them and finally how they died.

We were six players, divided into two Dead and 4 Memories. I was one of the Memories. The Memories can both ask questions and make statements about the Dead and their relationships, feelings and beliefs. The Dead can accept or reject these as they please and steer their story in a path they prefer. A Memory eventually takes on the role of an important person in the life of the Dead, and improvise scenes of life events. The Dead do not interact with each other.

As the rules are written it is unclear whether a given Memory can talk to and act out life scenes with multiple Dead in the session. That’s how we started, with Memories asking probing questions to one Dead, having a bit of dialogue or larp about whatever came up and then drifting off to do the same with the other Dead. We eventually realized that this wasn’t working.

If a Memory player is not aware of the character traits and life experiences that the Dead defined together with another Memory, then they can’t build off of that when larping scenes. The exploration becomes unnecessarily slow and clunky as the Dead has to get the wandering Memory up to speed before they can really progress in the life story. We decided that each Memory would pick a Dead and stay with them for the rest of the game. We had just enough time the get to a satisfying ending by playing in this more efficient way, so the decision saved the session.

We discovered that the Dead I focused on was an oncologist who got into the field for prestige and recognition, but her selfishness drove away all the people close to her. Her toxic view on relationships came from her parents who taught her to seek status and be “a winner” who only associated with other successful people. After her husband left her and she lost her job she was mortally injured in a drunk driving accident. Just before she passed away her ex-husband rushed to her bedside and told that her life mattered and that the work she did would make the world a better place.

In the end Who I Was gave me strongest emotional payoff of all the games I played at SSF.

Meeting people at SSF

The crowd at SSF 2024 was the most diverse I have ever seen at a role playing focused event. I estimate that about half the attendees were female, while other conventions and meetups I’ve been to had a clear majority of men in the role playing spaces. There were people of ages 20 to 70 at SSF. I had never role played with a grandmother before! People came from all parts of Europe (though most were Nordic) and were generally curious about each other and willing to talk. It was interesting to hear about their experiences with different types of role playing, from various tabletop systems to week long costume larps.

Conclusion

When I left Stockholm Scenario Festival 2024 I had learned that I could free form role play and enjoy it a lot. But I also learned that I appreciate an appropriate level of constraint and structure in the rules concerning who gets to give input when. It makes it so much easier to actually “play together”, as in listening to what each person is saying and incorporating it into our own inputs.