These are the wonderful larp people who will be will be honouring The Smoke as our guests in 2018!

Muriel Algayres

Muriel Algayres is a historian, teacher and game designer from France. She has a strong interest and focus in historical larps, the romanesque style, edularp, gender roles and feminism. She has been creating games for more than 12 years – among which A Friend in Need (in the #Feminism anthology), and Harem Son Saat – and writing about larp theory and design analysis.

She will be running her latest game, Sorority, a larp on friendship, self-determination and, of course, sorority, told through the parallel destiny of women before, during and after WWI. The larp explores does a group of women, meeting by chance in an art atelier, learn to understand, support and care for each other as they learn about suffragism and their condition. Sorority will be the last installment in the Belle Époque larp trilogy, after Flowers of May and La Vie Bohème.

Sue L

I say “Bring on the games.” And the people, there are so many lovely people in this here hobby of ours. Well I say hobby but really it’s so many hobbies. Frocking, prop making, writing, logistics, scenery, increasingly tech wrangling and don’t forget cat herding, I love what we do collectively!

As for me, I am Doyenne of UK Freeforms, instigator of both Consequences and Peaky Games. Laser tagger, board gamer, game writer, player and enabler. I love talking games and making them happen.

At The Smoke 2018, Sue is presenting the larp Critical Path.
(Photo by Oliver Facey.)

Jamie MacDonald

Jamie is a Helsinki-based performing artist (stand-up comedy, performance art, theatre) whose introduction to Nordic Larp started about a decade ago as an interest in the crossover potentials of larp and theatre. More recently, as larp makers invest in the idea of larp as a form of art, Jamie is interested in the ways critical art practice may apply to larp.

He has created pieces like Walkabout and The Lovers’ Matchmaking Agency (running here at The Smoke 2018) together with Aarni Korpela, written chamber larps, and contributed written analysis of the larp scene and play and performance. He is a co-organiser of Just a Little Lovin’ in Finland in 2018, and an all-around good-time queer transgender guy.
(Photo by Vesa Tyni.)

Karete Jacobsen Meland

Karete Jacobsen Meland is a larp designer and event organizer from Kolbotn/Oslo. She has played an active role in the chamber larp scene in Norway, in particular in Trondheim. She has designed several chamber larps, including Wilt and To the Wonder (which she is running here at The Smoke 2018), and was one of the founders of the Trondheim Larp Factory. In 2014 she was one of the head organizers of the first national conference on larp in Norway, Spillerom, also in Trondheim.

Karete is behind several articles on larp, and in 2013, she was editor of the Knutepunkt books. In 2017, she was one of the head organizers for Knutepunkt in Norway.

Currently, Karete lives in the Oslo area, with a dayjob as a psychologist at Gaustad hospital, as well as a part-time position for the roleplaying company Alibier. At the Larpwriter Summer School, she has combined her professional and larp expertise as a teacher on the subject of post-larp work («debrief»).