Where Love Happens

We are happy to announce the first larp from the programme for Grenselandet 2026; Where Love Happens by Kaisa Kangas, Essi Santala, Tonja Goldblatt, Helena Markku, Elena Rekola, Riina Tikkanen

“Do You believe epic love stories only happen on the silver screen? Think again! At Where Love Happens, we specialize in making Your romantic dreams come true. Powered by our advanced AI Aphrodite, our matchmaking process delivers a 99% success rate in finding Your One True Love.”
Where Love Happens is a comedy about romantic comedies and their clichés – you might call it a deconstruction of a romantic comedy. It studies the relationship between humans and objects by combining larp with puppetry. Participants will get to play together with human-sized Cupid puppets that are manipulated by professional puppeteers.  Participants will also use hand puppets to represent their characters in some scenes.

Participants play customers at the romantic consultation agency Where Love Happens that is run by two Cupids – magical creatures with special powers.

The characters are ordinary people who long for Hollywood-style romance. Humour is born out of the clash between reality and Hollywood-shaped dreams, expectations, and norms. The larp has a narrative arc where the characters move towards liberation from the romantic conventions Hollywood has fed them.

Since the larp deals with Hollywood tropes, it involves heteronormativity and LGBT tokenism. There is also soft mind control. You might not get to play a character that has the same gender or sexual orientation as yourself. There is potentially awkward content such as dating and relationship crises. Participants are expected to be comfortable with hugging and with touching each other’s hands and arms. Sex can be a topic in the larp, but players are not expected to play erotic scenes. Some scenes are played using puppets but the larp does not require any previous experience on puppetry.

Where Love Happens has been financially supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation and the Finnish Arts and Culture Agency.

Photo by Tuomas Puikkonen

Call for larps 2026

Want to run a larp at Grenselandet 2026?

We are pleased to open our call for larps for the festival on December 4th and 5th. Whether you have a ready-to-play and well tested larp, or just an idea in the making, we would love to hear from new and old larpmakers. Send us your pitch today, and hopefully you will run it at the festival in the Winter!

Grenselandet offer high quality venues, including professional black boxes, depending on the format and requirements of the larp. We also have some budget for props and a small fund for travel (reserved for larpmakers who would otherwise not be able to travel). All larpmakers with a larp on the programme may attend the festival free of charge.

The 1st call for larps closes on July 1st.

Submit your larp idea here!

Bonus larp: Root and Branch

We unfortunately have to cancel Panopticon due to the larpmaker being ill. The good news is that we have a bonus larp for you to replace it with - Root and Branch by Alex Brown.

This is the story of humanoid creatures from a distant future time and space who evolved in symbiosis with the forest. In this world, a dream is the root of one’s identity, and has the same importance as waking reality. 

Guided by collective dreams, stories will branch in non-linear directions, affecting past, present and future. Under threat from an aggressive rival, the forest is slowly taken away, and our protagonists struggle to hold on to their power.

Final larp: House Party

Today we relaese our final addition the programme - House Party by Laurie Penny. 

It’s 2084 in an alternate-Future Britain. Airstrip One
is a totalitarian nightmare, and you are a contestant on a long- running reality tv show called House Party. Think Big Brother, but literally. Taskmaster,  with a lot more mortal peril.

Contestants play silly games for points, and if you manage to win enough, you can go home with a huge prize. But every month, one contestant must be chosen by the others to die.

Meanwhile, the producers are keeping an eye on the audience ratings- and if the drama drops off and ratings drop too low, they might decide to ‘make things more interesting.’

In this game, you can play one of the twelve contestants OR you can choose your level of interaction, and direct play, by playing a drone camera operator.

A character-driven game about performance, social capital and collective bullying. We will workshop, build characters and relationships for just under 1.5h,  and then we’ll play for just under 2.5h, with a break in between. 

Have fun! Make friends! Win prizes! Try not to die!

Content warning: state oppression, character death, terminal illness.

Above Your Station

Our second last addition to the programme is Above Your Station by Laurie Penny. 

A scenario about improvising badly, for everyone who has ever been scared to larp because they think they’re bad at improvisiny!

The first galactic summit between a mysterious alien species and the great and good of the human race is due to take place on a janky little space station. Unfortunately, there’s been an accident, and the great and good of the human race have not shown up. You are a tourist, a drifter, a space weirdo with a menial job on the station, a drunk, a criminal or all of the above. Together you must negotiate for the future of your species. The conference starts in ten minutes. Good luck.

FUCK. MARRY. KILL.

We still have a handful of programme updates, and today we present FUCK. MARRY. KILL. by Jost Hansen.

This is a playtest of a scenario based on back stabbing negotiations mixed with desire and rivalry.

The Crime Overlord is dead, and it's up to the rival mafiosos to choose a new one. In this chamber larp, ​​everyone has someone they lust, someone they want to help, and someone they hate like the plague, but all of them want, above all, to seize power.

Into the Unknown

Today we present Into the Unknown by Halfdan Justesen & Sagalinn Tangen - a larp about the fear of the unknown and having to grow up too fast, heavily inspired by Over The Garden Wall.

A group of children get lost while trick-or-treating and find themselves in an eerie place called The Unknown, populated by strangely familiar figures. They do not know how they came here or why. That is not important. What’s important is they need to get back home, before it's too late. Before the Beast takes them.