The award-winning, sold-out Nordic Larp is now available as a free digital edition. Up until now, the book, edited by game researchers and life-long role-players Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola, has been a difficult to find treasure for role-play enthusiasts, researchers, and artists.

Live action role-playing has developed into a unique and powerful form of expression in the Nordic countries. Nordic style larps range from entertaining flights of fancy to the exploration of the intimate, the collective, and the political. This unique tradition combines influences from theatre and performance art with gamer cultures, in order to push the boundaries of role-playing.

Recently the Nordic larp tradition has gained attention internationally. This book presents a cross-section of this vibrant culture through 30 outstanding larps, through stories told by designers, players and researchers, with over 250 photographs. In addition the book contains essays explaining the history and rhetorics of Nordic larp, and contextualizing it in relation to theatre, art and games.

The book has been hailed as “mandatory reading” (Aaron Vanek), “a remarkable tome” (Mike Tice), and a “major cultural service to game, culture and art studies” (Frans Mäyrä). According to Lizzie Stark “Anyone interested in the future of larp and its possibilities as a medium should read this book.” In 2012 Nordic Larp received the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming.

The digital edition of Nordic Larp is available from the University of Tampere: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-91-633-7857-7

Edit: Don’t be intimidated by the Finnish on the site. The site translates into English from the upper right hand corner.