Former Vampire Larp Child Prodigy: Juhana Pettersson

The lead designer of Enlightenment in Blood is the Nordic Larp veteran Juhana Pettersson, known for larps like Luminescence, Halat hisar and End of the Line. He's one of the many people in the Nordic larp scene who came to larp through Vampire: the Masquerade tabletop role-playing.

In this short interview, Juhana talks about his personal relationship with Vampire: the Masquerade and the World of Darkness.

How did you start playing Vampire?

I've told this story many times, but in 1996 I saw a documentary on Finnish television about Vampire larp. In retrospect, it was a terrible documentary, but I was fifteen years old and I'd recently discovered the tabletop game. The larp looked like the coolest thing in the world.

I recognized some of the people in the documentary, so I contacted them and asked to be let in the larp. They had an age limit of sixteen, so I lied about my age. Most of the other people were five or ten years older than me, but I was hooked anyway. When I turned 18, I was asked to join the organizer team, again as the youngest member by a wide margin.

Why do you find the World of Darkness interesting?

I love the worldbuilding vision of it, that it's so big, there's so many interconnected things. The vampires with their intrigues, the werewolf ecoterrorists, the mages fighting for the shape of reality and so on.

I also like them as horror games. The vampires brought low by their endless craving for blood, to such a point that they don't even realize that ghouling a human is destroying a life. Werewolf has become even more relevant now than it was in the Nineties, with global warming and the dangers it presents.

To me, the most horrible of them all is Changeling, although its horror is more subtle than that of the others. The sadness, the loss, the pain of playing these fading creatures of the imagination hits hard because the game is so much closer to ordinary human experience than the abstract spheres of Mage or the grey wastelands of Wraith.

What's the best thing for you about designing Enlightenment in Blood?

The chance to do something I haven't done before. The character creation tool is a wonder to work with and I really hope players will find it as useful as I do. In my most hubris-filled moments I feel like it could revolutionize the way larps are designed – especially big ones.

But of course, I'd be lying if tried to pretend this wasn't great fun for the old World of Darkness fan inside me. These things have been part of my imagination since I first bought a copy of Werewolf: the Apocalypse from our local game store in Helsinki in the 1990s, and it's great to be able to work with them on such a grand scale.

Juhana's personal website is here: www.juhanapettersson.com