Here is my attempt to write up my impression of "the Danish Roleplaying Tradition".

It is not easy to define what the Danish Roleplaying Tradition is. Other than the fact that there is a community of people centered around the yearly game convention Fastaval that identify itself as belonging to that tradition. Each year, 15-25 scenarios are developed and presented at the game convention. Designed to be played only by reading the text, usually read in advance by a game master. The classical format is 5 or 6 players, one game master and 4-6 hours.

Other game conventions exist (e.g. Viking-Con), and scenarios are written also for these, but one thing makes Fastaval stand out: The Otto competition. Initiated in the early nineties as a pastiche over the Oscar awards, it rewards the submitted entries in different categories. The categories currently are: Best Scenario, Best Story, Best Mechanics, Best Characters, Best Presentation, The Audience Award, and the Jury Special Price. The Otto committee is composed by 4-6 volunteers from the community, usually previous contributors.

Due to the competition and due to the tradition to have people volunteer to run a game from the written text alone, there is much focus on presentation and communication of how to run the game.

The Danish roleplaying game conventions began in the early eighties. The first Fastaval was in 1986 and the first Viking Con was in 1982.

Phase 1: The age of systems
Up until around 1990, events at the game convention would be called e.g. the AD&D scenario and the Call scenario, being written for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and Call of Cthulhu. Player characters would be defined by filling in the player characters sheets for these games and the scenario would be a mystery in the classic investigation & action genre.

Phase 2: Everything went basic - the coming of characters
At some point, player characters would get a back story and some predetermined relations with the other player characters. The stats for the characters would fade in the background, being stated more for flavor than for function. Scenarios would state at first that the system was “basic roleplaying” (1992), then they would claim to be “systemless” (1993).

Conflicts were roleplayed (i.e. player vs. player discussion) or determined by GM fiat.

Phase 3: Intrigues everywhere
Different genres would then evolve. A very popular one were intrigue games, where some or all of the session is played out with the players moving around in character and talking with each other and secretly with one or more game masters. The first of these appeared around 1994.

Semi-live would show up as an important technique, where scenes are set usually by the game master and acted out in characters by the players, but without costumes, and with a clear defined scene start and scene end. Sometimes symbolic props will be used (swords, guns, etc.).

Storytelling roleplaying (fortællerollespil) was another genre to appear (around 1997). Sometimes without a game master, games of this kind would present detailed characters with a predefined background and provide with a framing story in which the characters would tell stories about the past.

Extras roleplaying (bipersonrollespil) arrived around 2002. The scenario would focus on a tight story where all or all but one of the players would play extras. This works well for comedy with a very strict setup of scenes, and for drama focused on one central character.

The last genre to be mentioned here is the ensemble drama, where each player has multiple characters, playing out a story in the style of Magnolia or Short Cuts.

Phase 4: The rebirth of systems
Around 2003, the indie wave started being noticed in Denmark, gaining followers among e.g. people, who liked that they were allowed to roll dice and play a game again, rather than striving for character immersion and a strong game master to control the story. Up until that point, it was a strong opinion that rules and mechanics got in the way of pure play. You’d never talk about the game during the game – if you had to break out of character, you would break the illusion and ruin the game.

The Forge put focus on the narrative and the drama rather than simulation and physics. But also allowed this to be explicit in the game rather than something that the game master secretly did behind the curtain.

Scenarios were submitted that suddenly used cards and dice for distributing authority over the story differently between the participants.

Also, the jävla avant-garde Swedes would show up and present Jeepform as yet another style of play.

Thanks for doing this, Frederik. A couple of questions:

Are any of these available in English? I know Mikkel Bækgaard had some components of A Day In The Life in English, but maybe not the whole game. Has your success prompted anyone to begin translation projects?

What's the next big thing? What's going to be cutting edge at Fastaval this year, building on the tradition?

Yeah, this was really great input. I have read a lot of Danish games, (not really played one, though) but it was really nice to see this history in compact form.

I should have been born a Dane.

Interesting stuff. It's quite similar to the stages of French roleplaying though the French seemed to skip stage 3 and go straight to 4.

Posted By: svenI should have been born a Dane.

*I* should have been born a Dane. Maybe Frederick and I are distant cousins. :)

How popular were the White Wolf games in Denmark in the 90s? Did they have an influence on Phase 3 games? This period of 1994 - 2003 seems to coincide with the rise and decline of the Vampire LARP scene here in the U.S.

Posted By: Frederik J. Jensen@Jason:
The only scenarios available in English are Lady & Otto by Frederik Berg Østergaard - and then the Jeepforms and Montsegur 1244. The Norwegians and Swedes seem to have a head start on that. Translation projects have not been initiated on an organised level - but this year, a number of entries at Fastaval are multilangual.

And I think this has to do with that the Danish scene is so strong in itself. we have a couple of groups in Sweden, (notably the Jeepsters, although they cant be seen as a Swedish group these days, since they have branched out) but there is very little communication between groups. "Novel" techniques are being rediscovered all the time, we fully lack the complete knowledge of our past, which the Dansih freeform scene obviously has. There are a couple of huge collections of Dnaish games on the net (luckily I can read them, even if it goes a bit slow). In Swedish we know have the Jeep guys, but everything else is in peoples harddrives.

Posted By: Frederik J. Jensen
@Tim:
World of Darkness gained its followers in DK - though I was not one of them, so I may have understated the influence. A number of Vampire, Wraith and Werewolf scenarios have been written, sometimes using only the setting, not the system. There were definately some years where we saw a lot of people with white and black make up :-)

In the traditional histiography of the Nordic "freeer" forms Vampire is usually listed as a huge influence and rightfully so, but I think that it might have been more important for the larp scene. I know for certain that many of the more influential art-haus larp-wrights started with WOD-larps.

Another huge influence in the early days that I completely forgotten: The Fastawood model by Ask Agger. Taking the Hollywood model for action movies and applying it to scenarios were actually an important step in having a more reflected approach to scenario design. You had to have a hook, escalation and turning points, a point of no return, leading to the climax followed by a denoument. This was introduced around 1993-4 and used in workshops.

@Frederik: Great summary of Danish styles (and thanks for listing my work as a historical influence :-). It's a funny coincidence, I've been thinking about writing an article about the Danish styles and their development for the past couple of weeks. I'll get back to it after Fastaval - I think there are a few more styles (or substyles) worth mentioning, and I'll try to add something about the whys and hows to the whats (for the uninitiated: Fastaval is just over a week away as of this writing).

@Jason: I would say that the major trend at this year's Fastaval is fusion. Merging the styles and techniques of the Danish tradition with outside influences such as stricter rules-based mechanics or jeepform techniques. In fact, I think this has been the defining trend for a couple of years now - Danish scenario writers have looked at the indie wave with interest but not forgotten their own tradition, and so they have a whole bunch of tools available, and the challenge lies in picking the right tools for your idea and mixing them in the right way. I think the Fastaval scenarios will show that the results are getting better and better (I'm president of the Otto jury this year, so I've read the lot).

@Jonathan: The convention scenarios are certainly played outside conventions. I know several groups with a long-running tradition of playing the best convention scenarios at home. The two sites Frederik referred to, R'lyeh and Alexandria, have a huge stake in this since they've made a whole lot of scenarios available for free.