Last month I had the pleasure of taking part in a live action role playing game (larp) design workshop held online. In the span of two days, I was exposed to the amazing world of larp, got to meet incredible designers from around the globe, and create our own larps together. The design jam was a collaboration between Larpocracy, a project funded by EU Horizon Europe, and Chaos League, an immersive experience studio. I am thrilled that Alessandro Giovannucci, a cofounder of Chaos League, has taken time to tell us more about his work.
For those who haven’t heard of them before, what are larps?
Live action role playing games are embodied role-playing experiences. You do role-play, you embody something, this is the core. You can be a person, an elf, or a spoon and a knife dating. It’s so broad and larps can be very different from one another.
In more detail, they have rule sets, sometimes light rules, or heavy rules. They can have big locations, small locations, be held online. They can take three, four, five days long or they can take one hour. They can be a oneshot or they can be an entire campaign. In this way they are very much like tabletop role playing games, but the players embody something. The embodiment affects the design, you design for a different context, you rely on materials and rules differently.
I don’t want larps to be defined by only the external part. People say, “ah larps, so costumes, location, acting”. Yes, that’s part of it but it’s not only that. I’m always in search of the best locations and the visual aspects are important, but it’s not only that. It would be like saying cinema is just a story acted out by cool people. It’s not enough to describe it.
Can you tell us a bit about Chaos League?
I would define it as a collective of people that do larp game design in different fields. It’s composed of three main ingredients that have formed over time.
The first ingredient was a group of friends in Pescara Italy that didn’t have a lot to do and felt in love with tabletop role playing games. We found each other at school when we were kids and started a small, passionate community to play games, we were like the kids in Stranger Things.
The second ingredient is art. A lot of us in Chaos League come from art backgrounds. I am a musician, other people come from theatre, visual art, cinema. Some of us got into art by roleplaying, and vice versa for some. Even though a larp isn’t a show because its interactive, you need to set everything up like a movie set, lights, props, costumes, you need sound designers and light designers, you need artists.
The third ingredient is that we discovered larp can be a very powerful political instrument. It’s a tool to speak with people, to understand society from another point of view, discover what’s around you or what’s active in society— there are so many things inherently political about larps.
How did Chaos League become what it is today?
It’s a long story, it took decades. When we started, we didn’t know where it would lead us. It started out as a little thing in a group of friends, and when you have ten years of experience visiting fictional worlds, behaving differently with other people in the games, you discover how this could relate to bigger things.
There was a mutual back and forth with our games. You feed the games content and themes, and they give you a sort of feedback when you play them. We grew up with that and then our small community grew up, got jobs to fund our ideas and networks to play them with. But we also had time to mature and be ready for bigger ideas.
We organized our very first larp the region of our hometown. We didn’t have driver’s licences, and at that time there was no internet. We spread word around to the nerds in town, “come to this location in the woods with your costume and have a good time!” Nowadays that would be weird, but that’s how we started. We organized locally for many years with the same community of players and that was important. This was a very isolated region in Italy which meant we were forced to create our own style. The feedback loop for developing the games was very effective. You could try something and immediately see the result, then take the lesson and make another game for the same group of players. We could fine tune a lot, then we were confident enough to propose our games and ideas outside of our community. In the meantime, the internet made it easier to connect, we saw bridges we could build with other existing larp communities.
Can you highlight some larps Chaos League has done?
In 2017-2018 we created Bunker 101, a Fallout inspired dystopian game styled after the American 50’s and played in a real atomic bunker. We recreated a town in this setting for a “slice of life” type of larp. It was a way to reflect on our society, freedom, reaching the limits of what it means to be a good citizen, how much you pay or give up for your own security. It was very well received; we are reworking it this year for another edition.
In 2020 we created Expedition Sahara. The idea started when a few of us visited Tunisia. While we were there, we had the idea to create a larp in the desert. It was a crazy idea, we didn’t know how it would be possible, so we discarded it for a while. By 2018 after coming back to it a few times we thought, let’s try it. We did the worst advertising ever because we were so unsure if people would be willing to pay, take the time off, and fly to the middle of nowhere while not knowing us. We put the word out to see who would be interested, saying that if we got at least 50 interested responses via email that we would try it. After the first hour we had 2000 emails.
Another successful larp we developed was Miskatonic University 2022. This we were able to run in Europe and in the United States. In these larps we recreated the university from Cthulhu mythos. We made it clear in the event communication but also its writing and design to avoid problematic clichés and content that came from H.P. Lovecraft’s racist perspectives. We wrote a story that reclaimed what we loved, was enjoyable for our time, and was sincere to our beliefs at Chaos League. Being able to run the larp in the US was also a great opportunity to be exposed to another larp culture and learn a lot from what was different.
Last year we did a larp called Eclipse, it was a sci-fi story on the topic of climate change worries. The story was that the planet was completely ruined, we need a planet b but it’s not easy or ethical to reach, or maybe there are other people on the planet to colonise. The larp was very popular, it had a huge amount of signups compared to average in the international larp scene. We even had a journalist from Playboy who attended and wrote an article about us in one of their magazines.
How do you approach the challenge of larps being a niche medium when it has such potential for impact?
I think larp can create such life changing experiences, and I want other people to be exposed to them. They can form their own opinion about it, like it, hate it, create their life around it, but they need to know. It drives me crazy knowing how good larps are yet how unknown they are. In my ideal world larp is like football- no, it’s like the ball. Maybe you like to play with the ball, maybe be a professional volleyball player, maybe play ball with your friends. If someone has never played a larp in their life, I want to try to make it happen for them. We don’t aim to have more Chaos League players, just more people being exposed to larp.
We have analysed why larp is difficult to approach. Larp can be intimidating and difficult to try. You may have to travel, you may have to pay money for food, lodging, or costume. You may also be scared because you don’t know what it is or know anyone in the scene, it’s scary to go alone. It can be an issue of accessibility and being welcoming enough.
As far as finances, there are small formats that can be played for free or for very little money. These formats are very important, experiences that don’t require props, expensive location bookings, traveling. For example, in Italy we created a larp club network where in seven towns they offer small format larp games once a month, for free. Maybe you don’t know what larp is but it’s in your town and it’s free. You don’t have to know anything; they help you with the rules and you play. Afterwards you go home or maybe go for a beer and connect with the community. It’s also always about making larps playable for people of different degrees of background experience and commitment. When we create a big one hundred fifty person larp, we don’t assume they all have larp experience.
We also organize things online like the larp design workshop, it’s free, it’s accessible. You can do it from your sofa, get to know the community, it can be safer than showing up physically and we understand that.
We also expand outside our bubble by producing material like writing or videos, collaborating with artists, or participating in interviews like this. Having wider reach and exposure also lets us work with more EU funded projects, this way we can reach people in fields like education— or even just people that can incorporate it into their own practices. This funding also helps the larps be more financially accessible, some international larps can easily cost participants hundreds of Euros otherwise. The European Commission has determined that larps are worth taxpayer money, they create positive impacts on society.
What is in store for the future Chaos League?
We have a lot of projects in our mind, and we will continue being very active in the larp scene. Creating larps that have new elements, clever and elegant design, making larps more accessible. We also want to continue exploring other similar mediums like developing a tabletop role playing game and doing more in the immersive experience field in general. Immersive experiences that are not fully role playing can be more appealing for the general public.
We know larps may never be in the mainstream. There are moments where it gets more or less popular, and as larp reaches more people it doesn’t make it less effective or innovate, it doesn’t mean we stop experimenting. Mainstream projects don’t necessarily overshadow underground projects. If you say that, you imply that erasing a mainstream project will make everyone will run to underground work, which won’t happen— and if it does it’s not underground anymore, it’s mainstream! We need both. Sometimes underground creeps up, like it has with tabletop roleplaying games. There was a moment where TRPGs were dying and now it’s big again, it’s a balance.
My approach is, let’s see what is good and create something personal. I was organizing larps when I had twenty players and half of them were my school mates. I get the same feeling when I organize them now in a room crowded with hundreds of people. For me the important thing is to create something, make it work, and involve people in the design process. No matter if it’s hundreds of strangers or a few close family members, I am just as excited because it works, and when it works its magic.
Photo Credit: Chiara Cappiello