I’ve found out something interesting about the Swedish LARP culture, again… 
I have always considered the Nordic (Sweden, Norway and Finland, and maybe also Danmark) LARP scene as more grown up, realistic, with “better equipment” and so on than the “continental LARP scene” (say Germany, French, Belgium, Italy).
The thing I found out is that everything has to do with the specific countries/regions reenactment scene.
The western and southern parts of Europe have a very welldeveloped reenactmentscene, with many societies doing everything from sewing historically correct clothes (a tunic model 1206 someone?) to cooking medieval food.
The LARPers down there are then much more aimed at the fantasy adventure. “If you wants to recreate the medieval, become an reenactor!”. The LARPs seem to be much more like ordinary role playing games, with lots of rules (Specific hitpoints for your armour parts, possibillity to rise in “level” and so on), lots of magic, heroes, fantasy creatures, epic battles. In Sweden we call this (actually in a bit of negative meaning) high fantasy.
In the Nordic countries we never had any strong reenactor scene. If you ask someone in the street if he has any idea of what reenactment is most people will give you a confused look and say “No, I don’t”. If you ask someone if he knows what LARP is most people will at least recognise the term (“Well, something with people in medieval clothes running around in the forest”), many people you even know someone that is LARPing (mainly if you ask younger people).
The whole thing is that the nordic LARP scene has been shouldering the burden of the (missing) reenactment scene, which is novadays beginning to grow steadily. Therefore, the developement of the nordic (especially the Swedish I think…) LARP scene between 1995 and 2005 has steadily pointed at becoming more realistic, more “historical” (even if regular LARPs set in a historical medieval time are few) and most of all less fantasy.
A developement even I have noticed since I started with LARP spring 2003 is that the amount of Low Fantasy LARPs (in Sweden that often means that there is a village with humans and some folklore creatures in the forest, never any orches, dark elves and so on) are steadily increasing, and the amount of High Fantasy LARPs are steadily decreasing.
This very morning I wrote a post on the http://www.lajvsverige.se-forum regarding the fact that as soon someone asks something like “May I have this or this equipment on LARPs” the answer is “No, there were no such thing in the medieval”. <-- SO? 99% of the LARPs in Sweden aren’t medieval, they are medievalinspired fantasyLARPs. If the organizer (game master) of the LARP decides that you can bring a specific equipment (this time it was some old pistol alá 1650) because it exists in there LARP world, so be it.
Too many people seem to think that they at the same time may tell people that “That didn’t exist in the medieval!” and then themselves show up on LARPs dressed in something they think are “medieval”, but in fact is totally incorrect. Most LARP-clothes I have seen in my life looks a lot more like 1500-1600 clothes, with some touch of something that never existed at all in known human history = Fantasy.
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So, after this 300page novel of babbling about problems in the Swedish LARP-culture ( 
) I wonder if you are having any similiar problems? And most of all, do your country have a relatively strong reenactment scene, e.g. do people recognise the world reenactment better than the term LARP?[/color]
Normally the games are set in some forest somewhere, without houses and stuff.
) but it will certainly be nice. There will be 500-800 participants (or so I’ve heard).
