Lizzie Stark

The BBC films a segment on Leaving Mundania, and a great review from Geekadelphia.

Leaving Mundania hits stores, and the Oxford English Dictionary adds "LARPing."

While I was in Finland, I had the pleasure of participating in the Nordic Larp Talks, a yearly series of short talks on larp and larp design modeled on the TED talks and hosted by famed journalist, author and larper Johanna Koljonen. I chose to tell a story that I didn’t have room for in Leaving Mundania, [...]... Read More

Does the idea of larp fascinate you or pique your interest? Do you live in New Jersey? Do you play Knight Realms, Dystopia Rising, or another local game? Been to the DREAMATION and DEXCON conventions? Are you friends with a certain Rutgers physicist? Come on down to the Fallout Shelter (Comics, Games & Collectibles!) tomorrow night for [...]... Read More

Notes I took during the player safety panel at Solmukohta 2012.

Solmukohta, the weirdly-named Finnish edition of the Knutepunkt convention ended more than a week ago, but the symptoms of Nordic withdrawal linger. Do you suffer from this dread disease? Symptoms may include: using the prefix “knute-” for everything, regardless of appropriateness greater-than-normal addiction to social media new Facebook/forum friends excessive honesty logorrhea that may include long [...]... Read More

I’ve written about the programming that I enjoyed at Solmukohta, but I’ve got more observations scrambling to escape my noggin. Here they are, in no particular order: Travel Fatigue Foreign travel depresses my natural level of pep. There’s something about the unfamiliarity of small events — the rude-sounding “toilet” instead of the “restroom,” the luncheon [...]... Read More

After my stop in Denmark for Fastaval, I headed to Helsinki to participate in Solmukohta, the Finnish installation of the Knutepunkt conference that rotates its way around the Nordic capitals, changing its name according to the local languages. The event features larps, workshops, run-downs of completed or upcoming games, and tons of talks on larp [...]... Read More

A copy of the rant I delivered at 2012 Solmukohta. Profanity included.

The first stop on my crazy Nordic tour was Fastaval, a convention devoted to board-gaming, larps, and freeform games. What are freeform games, you ask? No one knows for sure. They are sort of like tabletop games, except you sometimes get up and act out scenes rather than simply narrating them. And on the whole, [...]... Read More