Along with the rebrand of this website from Alchemical Gaming to Narrative Alchemy, I am officially opening my doors today as a pastoral counselor. While I used to have some imposter syndrome around this, I can’t deny that friends have occasionally come to me for religious or spiritual advice, throughout my adult life. I am […]
Regarding a certain Facebook controversy
Now that it’s two and a half years later, I need to set the record straight about certain things. A friend recently wrote a blog post discussing an attempt to smear his reputation, and I realized it’s time I addressed a similar situation. Certain people in the East Coast larp community have tried to paint […]
How One Rabbi Uses Roleplaying Games to Build Community
(Originally published on WIRED . Article by Eli Reiter.) AT HIS BAR Mitzvah in his Reconstructionist Jewish synagogue, Rabbi Menachem Cohen hoped to be saved. “I was waiting for God to plunk me on the head and take me on a spiritual trip. A spiritual acid trip, without ever taking acid,” he says. It never […]
A meme from Facebook
The Butterfly Effect Manifesto
By Kjell Hedgard Hugaas and Sarah Lynne Bowman. This post was originally published on nordiclarp.org, and is reprinted here with permission from the authors . This manifesto describes in detail our preference for playing, designing, and facilitating larp experiences with the explicit purpose of encouraging transformative impacts within participants. This work is a synthesis of […]
Larp is a Chrysalis
If all the world’s a stage, identity is nothing but a costume.” -Lana Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski, Sense8 “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person; give him a mask, and he’ll tell you the truth.” -Maxwell Demon, fictionalized glam-rock persona from Velvet Goldmine, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde At an after-school program at […]
Alchemical Gaming: A New (Old) Vision for Positive Bleed
(Note: This article is a draft, intended for eventual publication on nordiclarp.org. It has been edited by me, but not by one of their editors yet, so it may differ from the final version. I decided it was time to post it, because it represents the most complete and concise presentation of these ideas that […]
How Two Video Games Altered the Course of My Life
To fully understand the extent to which these games transformed my attitude and therefore my life, it’s important to understand where I was before I started playing them. This is around end of 2017. In addition to the nihilism in the political ethos I was also feeling an incredible amount of nihilism in my personal […]
The Power of Positive Bleed
Originally posted at The Space Between Stories. I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog discussing the negative bleed and how players can cope with it (the most prominent blog here); I suggest giving it a read in conjunction with this blog. However, I believe one of the most powerful, wonderful things about LARP is […]
Method Acting vs LARPing: A Dangerous Mix
Originally posted at The Space Between Stories. Bold and some links added by editor (Chance) for emphasis. I’m going to preface this post by saying I have a BFA in theater, have been acting (and studying various forms of ‘method’) for 25 years, was a director for 10 years, and have a lot of LARP […]