Odysseus - Here it is!

And so it begins! In this blog, we will tell you about our project, how we aim to achieve it, and what we will be providing for our players.

Odysseus is an ambitious project from a talented team that has decades of combined experience in creating memorable larps in Finland. There have not been that many international games in Finland, but we aim to change that!

While in Finland we lack truly fancy locations such as castles, we have a highly unique larp culture. Our larps have very strong narratives and much more pre-written content than most larp cultures. For example, in Finnish games, characters tend to arrive fully fleshed and written into the game narrative, with complex networks of predefined character relationships. A lot of effort tends to be spent on creating interesting characters with meaningful backstories, relationships, and ranges of plots to play throughout the larp. Of course there are similar larps in other countries, but since this method is used in the vast majority of Finnish larps, we have decided to call it “Finnish style larp.”

In Odysseus, we want to bring this story and character driven experience to the international audience. We want to challenge ourselves by creating a visually impressive experience and creating (and testing!) technology that gives our players the genuine feeling of piloting - and riding - a starship. While we want to create thrilling and exciting action scenes, we also want to give the players time and space to live and breathe their characters - all the difficult choices, losses, and joys of their lives.

Our biggest challenge is securing the perfect location and turning it into a real starship our players can fully immerse in. Another challenge is to create the network of technology that supports the experience. We will update our progress regularly in this blog to provide transparency and to give insights (that might help others) on how we tackle these challenges. We also want to keep everyone posted on how things are moving forward and to share our enthusiasm for the project.

We are firm believers in that the best player experiences are created when the game masters and players share a vision on their joint creation. A larp is always a combination of the vision of those who created the game and those who take part in it. If those visions are far apart, someone (or everyone) will be disappointed. Thus we will make the best effort to share our vision in a comprehensive way - and when our work is done, just sit back and watch our players do the magic! In the upcoming posts, we will be introducing our team members as well as different parts of the project; location, systems, props, fiction, character design - and many other. We hope you will join us on the journey!

Laura
Producer of Odysseus