Laivfabrikken - the "larp factory" - is an Oslo-based network of larp organisers who aim to produce at least one larp each month, every month. Our larps last less than a day, hold high quality, and have a low threshold for participation.
NB! The Oslo larp factory is currently inactive. Larps are still being organized under our banner, but no longer on a monthly basis.
Larp (live role-playing) is a form of drama which is done for the benefit of the participant (there is no audience) and which is typically improvised and unscripted. You can read more about larp on our Norwegian page or on Wikipedia.
"Low threshold" means players should be able to participate in one of our larps the same way they go to the cinema: you meet at the scheduled time, pay the entryticket, and begin playing. No preparations or pre-registration are required, though it can be a good idea to reserve a spot for our more popular events, the same way you would reserve a seat for the theatre or a concert.
We're especially welcoming to "new" or first-time players, who can expect extra help and explanations when joining one of our larps. None of our larps involve sleeping, so they last from a couple of hours to a day, with six hours being the typical duration of an event.
To ease role-playing, we often try to make costumes available for players to borrow, or set up very simple guidelines - e.g. "wear black". We also tend to start our larps with intense little drama workshops to help people get into character and "get" the idea of role-playing.
Most of our larps are played in Norwegian, but foreign residents or visitors are often welcome to join. Sometimes, English becomes the language of play, while other times you can play an English-speaking character. We recommend contacting the organizers of the event to clarify how the language question can be resolved in your case.
Our larps belong to the Nordic style, the style common in Finland and the Scandinavian countries. It's fairly different from UK and US LARP - more impro-theatre-like, with few game mechanics and lots of emphasis on un-interrupted role-play-acting in realistic-looking scenery. But we also enjoy counting hit points while fighting orcs with rubber swords, on occasion.
The typical Norwegian larp lasts a weekend to a week, and requires a fair amount of preparation in terms of costume-making, reading and workshoping. They also often take place in fantasy or historical milieus. The larp factory larps require no such preparations, and span many genres.
In the larp factory, our larps are often chamber games, and we additionally experiment with freeform and jeepform games, a Swedish/Danish style of role-playing somewhere between larp and rule-less tabletop RPGs, reminiscent of theater sports in their structured improvisations where players alternate between characters and scenes. Freeforms are traditionally played in your everyday clothes and without deliberate scenography, although we will sometimes disregard tradition and add visual debth.
We're (dis-)organized in the following way: every season, there's a pitching forum, where organisers pitch their upcoming larps, and we collectively decide which larps go on the calendar. In between pitching forums, there's an open and informal group called Limet ("the Glue") which maintains a flow of communication and supports the organisers of each larp. Decisions are ideally by consensus, and often by do-ocracy: the voices of people who contribute more, are louder.
The organisers of each event have absolute authority over the event, and do their own planning, fundraising etc. - though they need to conform to the principle of "high quality + low threshold" to be listed on our calendar. The meetings of the Glue are often workshop-like, with organisers of upcoming larps soliciting help and advice from the rest of the community.
After years of loose talk and occasional planning, laivfabrikken was formally founded in May 2009, and had by the end of the first season held 10 larps, most designed by local larpwrights and some imported scenarios such as J. Tuomas Harviainen's "Prayers on a Porcelain Altar" and Jeepen's "The Upgrade". We were inspired by the Fønix project in Bergen, with a similar emphasis on short low-threshold/high-quality larps, and motivated by a desire to reach out to new players and to provide larp experiences to older players who no longer had the time to participate in the 2-5-days long high-preparation larps common in Norway.
