IntroductionS: Laura

Hello! My name is Laura, and I'm the producer and lead story designer for Odysseus. I’ve been larping since year 2000 – and creating larps for almost as long. Above all, I am a writer of complicated relationship drama. Creating engaging and complex larps is my passion, and for the past 15 years, there have been only a few periods during which I did not have one or more projects to work on. My previous projects have included a court fantasy campaign called the Calbourne Saga, which consisted of eight games with 35-150 players per game. A more recent creation is the modern day fantasy drama Pyhävuoren perilliset (freely translated “Heirs of the Saint Hill”), which has been run for seven times for 30-40 players. I have also participated in several other projects as a character writer and a story designer. For the past couple of years I’ve been looking for a project that would inspire me – and which I could be truly enthusiastic about. As soon as we started working on Odysseus, I knew that this would be it.

Though creating larps is something I do on my free time, it is also something that I would love to consider making a career out of. At the moment, I work as a project manager in a large IT company, so organizing things and managing time and resources is something I do in my day job as well. In my own larp projects, I’ve always been the producer as well, but creating the story, characters, plots, and the whole fiction for the larp is what I truly love. I’ve participated as a speaker in Ropecon and X-Con, where I’ve talked about plot and story design, character design and player involvement. All of these are subjects whose evolution is close to my heart and about which I have always wanted to keep on learning more about.

During the past couple of years, I’ve participated in several very inspiring games that have given me a lot to think about in the field of what kind of experiences I want to provide to players as a writer. Two of these games were held early this year during the time I was forming the early sketches for the story design of Odysseus, so I ended up analyzing their story and design quite deeply. These games were the Finnish larp Tartuntavaara and Conscience, my first international larp. I enjoyed both games very much and learned enormously from the discussions I had with other players about their experiences and what made the games interesting and emotional for them. Both of these games exhibited many of the emotions and concepts I had thought of exploring in Odysseus, and I'm extremely happy that I had the chance to experience them.

Those two games, as well as others I’ve played in the past years – and the discussions that have ranged around them – have affected my thinking on what I want to create, and what players want to experience. My previous projects have been more focused on melodrama than actual drama, and even though they have been highly valued for it, I’m moving towards realism in plots, feelings, and interactions. As a result of several conversations and personal experiences, for Odysseus, I look forward to creating stories and characters that have impact on the players.

Laura, Producer of Odysseus