LARPing Is Actually A Vibe

An invite to Jetstar’s recent ‘Knights of the Skies’ tournament where five would-be LARPers battled it out for their share of $50k worth of flights gave me the ultimate excuse to learn more about this incredible hobby, and the people who put their all into making it happen.

One of my favourite things about 2025 is that it’s cool to try now. Gone are the days where we’d pretend we don’t care about the things we’re really into. Now, being a fan is how you find your people.

With this in mind, I was always going to be enthralled by LARP, the ‘Live Action Role Play’ activity which involves dressing as historical or fictional characters with a fantasy theme, duking it out in a duel and advancing storylines that often last years. So when the opportunity came up to go see LARPing happen irl and find out more about how it works as part of Jetstar’s 21st birthday tournament, ‘Knights of the Skies’, I was so there. Even more than the Grand Battle, chatting to Lou Harwood, Swordcraft’s Head of Advertising who plays Randi of the Vandrerheim Freeholders, a Norscan Herbalist, made my day. After more than 11 years LARPing, she’s put her whole self into the activity – and her passion is catching. Here’s Lou. 

AWOL: How’d you get involved in LARPing?

With this perspective, I was always going to be enthralled by LARP, the ‘Live Action Role Play’ activity which involves dressing as historical or fictional characters with a fantasy theme, duking it out in a duel and advancing storylines that often last years. So when the opportunity came up to go see LARPing happen irl and find out more about how it works as part of Jetstar’s 21st birthday tournament, ‘Knights of the Skies’, I was so there. Even more than the Grand Battle, chatting to Lou Harwood, Swordcraft’s Head of Advertising who plays Randi of the Vandrerheim Freeholders, a Norscan Herbalist, made my day. After more than 11 years LARPing, she’s put her whole self into the hobby – and her passion’s catching. Here’s Lou. 

So I was actually like, 15, yeah, and me and my high school partner were at a pop culture convention. We were already interested in fantasy and medieval stuff, and we saw these guys that had a booth there, and we saw these cool guys in armor and costumes with swords. And we were like, ‘What is this?’ And they said, ‘Oh, we do this every week on an oval in in the city, like every Friday’. We had to wait a little bit at the time because we were a bit too young, but when we were old enough to come along, we were addicted from the first game. Obsessed.

What made you so obsessed with it? 

The addictive part came originally from the combat; it’s quite an adrenaline rush when you get to jump into a shield wall and you’re fighting, everybody’s screaming and going along. So that’s what originally got me hooked. Now I stay for the role play and more of the storytelling. 

What’s the story right now, how does it work? 

So there is a story team in each chapter of Swordcraft that’s got like an overarching plot. And yeah, we are on the third year of that story which will run for five years. So basically every year for Melbourne, at least in our chapter, we have our quest, which is our camping event in September, and every quest is a chance to have advance the storyline more significantly. There’s more characters that develop and unfold and secrets out and all that sort of thing. Bit by bit, we’re piecing the story together, and it’s all building to one big, gorgeous grand finale at some point, which will then start a new plot line. 

When you show up each week, do you show up as the same character? 

It’s completely up to you. Some people have one character that they dedicate everything to. Other people have dozens and they’ll swap around depending how they feel. If you play like a really serious character with a lot of traumatic backstory who does a lot of very full-on role play, sometimes that can get exhausting. So especially when we go away, like camping, you might have a fun, jokey character. On the Fridays where we fight, you fight with your war band. Some people have multiple war bands. Those are like our sports teams. 

How did you come up with your character? And do you need to get your character checked with Swordcraft ahead of running with it to make sure it feels right?

You don’t necessarily have to. It’s good to run it by your war band, because your war band is there to help you. Yeah? They’re there to make sure that your characters are blending nice.  

Basically, I recently came up with my character. I had been playing a different character for about, I think, six or seven years, and then I finished up a storyline with her. We finished up a war that had been running for over 10 years. 

At that point, there’s only so much you can grow as a woman when you’ve been going for so long. So we felt it was about time to let them retire, let the woman retire and start something new, you know, get some new energy into our game, for us. 

So yeah, I sort of came up with a character that was a little bit different to my old character. My old character was very loyal and, you know, there for her friends and very brave and outgoing and stuff. And I wanted to do a character that was a bit more like self-conscious, a bit less loyal, and a bit more self interested, because it kind of creates some interesting character dynamics. 

In today’s pre-LARP briefing, I heard one of the leaders talking about the blurring of the lines between character frustrations in the game, versus like real-world frustrations. How does that distinction play out?  

So there’s something called character belief, and it’s a thing that even actors experience when they’ve been doing a show for so long, you know. It’s where your character’s emotions bleed into real life, any of those really heightened emotions, like anger, frustration, sadness – these ones are really easy to blur into, and it can kind of be hard to distance and, like, take a step back from it and go, ‘Oh, this is what my character is experiencing. It’s okay in real life,’ you know? It takes a lot of practice. It’s something that the veterans of this game are all really well versed in, yeah, and especially when we come back from a week away camping, you’ve been in character most of the time. You’ve dealt with some probably really heavy things, whether it be your friend’s characters dying or, you know, zombies coming into town as it is at the moment, we all try and really help each other get through that, you know, remember that it’s just a game. It’s not real. And kind of teach yourself how to separate.

What’s the most crazy, impactful, plot line that you can think of that you’ve experienced? ,

There is so much that goes on at any given event. There’s hundreds. Is not just Swordcraft’s main plot line. War bands have their own plot lines. Your characters have their own plot lines. The most impactful one that I’ve ever dealt with was meant, like many years ago now, I think maybe six or seven years ago now, the storyline in the world we were playing in was coming to an end, so we were playing like a world-ending scenario. Half of them were going through a magic portal, the other half was staying, like defending others to go through the magic portal. So we kind of all decided, okay, we’re going to stop before the game. We’re going to split up so we know who’s going through who’s staying. And in that moment in character, we looked at each other and realized we’re not going to see each other again, and you’re just standing like 10 feet apart. And you know after the battle, you’re going to go back to camp and chill out. But in that moment, not a single part of me was able to process that it was just pretend. And I was looking at these people that I’d known for five years at that point and crying my eyes out, like saying goodbye, hugging them like that was it? That was our goodbye. 

And what’s the storyline for today’s LARP?

This is a really fun story today. So we’ve got two heirs battling it out for the throne of a recently deceased King. Okay, so we’ve got House Jet and House Star fighting, and they’ve got some champions on their side, which is our lovely [Jetstar] contestants, and they’re battling to see which of the lovely heirs will secede to the throne. 

Fun! How do you feel about Jetstar getting involved in this community? 

Do you know what? It was a surprise, but it’s actually been so fun, and we’re so grateful for them reaching out to us. You know, it was an interesting concept. They really wanted to pay homage to 21 [as part of their 21st birthday celebrations]. The reason we celebrate it is because that’s when you could become a knight in your journey to knighthood. So when they reached out to us, we were super surprised, but so excited, and it’s been amazing to get to show off how fantastic LARP can be to the wider community because there’s a lot of people that either don’t know what it is or maybe have an idea from  American movies, which don’t always show just how, like, fun it can be. The movies show it in a very corny or cliche way, but yeah, as you can see, people put amazing effort into their costumes and their characters.

Find the latest from Jetstar here, and learn more about how you can get involved in LARPing with Swordcraft here.

Editor’s note: AWOL was gifted this invitation to see Jetstar’s ‘Knights of the Skies’ tournament in Melbourne.