Swedish Freeform and the Forge

[Jason Morningstar]

Sven Holmström has some interesting things to say about the similarities and differences between narrativist games emerging from the Forge and nordic friform gaming.  It was pointed out to me because he uses The Shab-al-Hiri Roach as an example, but his points are broadly applicable and worth considering, if you follow the nordic scene at all.  Which you probably should...

--Jason

[Green]

What an intriguing article!  Thanks for sharing it.

Strangely, I find that a lot of what I'm doing with my system is more compatible with Nordic-style roleplaying than I was even aware of.  The more I work with it, the more I'm liking those things.  I wish there were some Nordic RPers nearby to game with.  It would prove educational, I think.

[Jason Morningstar]

I feel the same way.  Some enterprising Con ought to fly some of these folks over to run some scenarios, be guests of honor, and pontificate.  They do that with North American game design luminaries often enough.

--Jason

[J. Tuomas Harviainen]

more compatible with Nordic-style roleplaying than I was even aware of.

Compatible with /some of the more artistic and/or experimental Nordic styles/, to be more correct. Please bear in mind that the typical role-playing practiced here isn't really different from what's been done elsewhere. The "Nordic scene" often refered to is a joint circle of very small, quite marginal cliques seeking and practicing new ways to play, many of which are utterly incompatible with one another. (The fact that all the most active artist/experimentalist larp/freeform designers here - myself included - are very arrogant when our own works are criticized doesn't help.) When Dissecting Larp's corrected electronic edition finally (it's now over 4 months late...) comes online, be sure to read its introductory piece (by Eirik Fatland). It clarifies the issue extremely well.

-Jiituomas

[Jason Morningstar]

Cool, Jiituomas, looking forward to that.  My experience is limited to the people I've met and their friends.  I have no idea what the nordic mainstream looks like, although the gaming-oriented shops I visited in Denmark looked an awful lot like the gaming-oriented shops in the United States (although ours don't generally carry LARP props).

[Merten]

Cool, Jiituomas, looking forward to that.  My experience is limited to the people I've met and their friends.  I have no idea what the nordic mainstream looks like, although the gaming-oriented shops I visited in Denmark looked an awful lot like the gaming-oriented shops in the United States (although ours don't generally carry LARP props).

The Nordic mainstream probably looks almost exactly like the mainstream in other countries, though including the locally published games which have so far been very close to the mainstream, either being translations or original games following the mainstream quite closely.

[Sven]

The Nordic mainstream probably looks almost exactly like the mainstream in other countries, though including the locally published games which have so far been very close to the mainstream, either being translations or original games following the mainstream quite closely.

Yeah. The Nordic table-top mainstream is mainly consisting of American games or local derivates of them. A slight difference between the Nordics is that Sweden has a much higher degree of local commercial games than Norway/Finland/Danmark. (And for some reason almost all of these are really traditional Basic Role Playing clones, mechanically.)

But at least in Sweden these friform games have had a quite high visibility through cons. As I have come to understand it they even dominated the larger cons for a few years, but are now declining for som reason. This has lead to a situation where not a too small part of the con-going crowd engage in friform at cons, but never with their ordinary groups. (The reason for this being that the whole genre grew out of cons. People wanted to make the coolest rpg one.shots. To be able to get a lot of playing time with players they had never met they made pre-fabricated characters, didn't care about rules, since it took too much time and focused on whacking the players with cool material.) I think that these types of games are somewhat more spread in Denmark. In Sweden they are more known than actually played, I would say.

The Nordic larp mainstream, on the other hand, actually is different. And larp in general differs much more between countries (even between language groups in the same country, as this text about larp in Belgium tells.). I guess this is really out of scope for this forum, but Jonas Barkå has here his second article about Nordic larps, if anyone would be interested. The first one is linked from there. You can meet me in the comments there.

/Sven Holmström (polyfem.blogspot.com)

[JonasB]

Ahh... my first post on the famous Forge!

Sven pointed me here and I also noticed a significant number of hits on my blog originating from this post. If Swedish Freeform is mentioned I cannot stay out.

Green: I would be very interested in reading more about this system of yours. I have had problems apreciating most of the well known games coming out of the Forge, making me very curious about how yours differ. Post me some links or tell me here, if you think it is enough within topic...

On my blog, Unrealities of Mine: It has turned out to be mostly about the so called "Nordic Scene", but you could also risk getting posts on traditional roleplaying games or boardgames.

[Jason Morningstar]

Welcome to the Forge, guys! 

Thanks for the clarification.  It's easy to compartmentalize when you don't have much perspective.  The same could be said about "Forge games", which is a pretty misleading term.  While you can trace evolutionary paths from game to game in some cases, there are folks here working on projects that fall outside that family tree as well. 

--Jason