Vision statement

At The One Without Sin we aim to portray ordinary people living through extraordinary times. The setting is that of a common village, with people living their every-day lives full of happiness, sorrows, relationships and conflicts. The story we want to tell is about what happens with these people when everything suddenly changes and the stories of witchcraft and evil lead to hysteria. It is an exploration of how fear and the drive to protect yourself and your loved ones can change a person, and what she is capable of doing. It is not primarily a story about the people who were charged and convicted of witchcraft, but more a story about their families and friends, the people who accused others, the people who didn’t dare to speak up, and the people who were left behind afterwards. We want it to be a larp with space for both subtlety and drama, where the small gestures, gazes and silence mean just as much as the big and dramatic scenes. It is a larp in the Nordic tradition, and it’s a larp for you if you enjoy relationship-driven play, play in which silence and small gestures can mean everything, and the exploration of what fear and desperation might drive your character to do. 

The One Without Sin is a larp based on true historic events. Witch hunts and witch trials occurred all over Europe (and later, America) during the 15th to 17th centuries, and over 30 000 lives (most likely far more) were lost. This particular larp tells the story about the witch trials in Sweden in the mid-1600s, and we aim to portray Swedish culture and ordinary Swedish people in the 1600s – how they could have acted, felt and related to each other. Many parallels can of course be made to other times and places. While we think the actual history and the actual people of the time are important and we want to make the story plausible, it is still a larp, and not a reenactment event. This means that our focus is on the stories we tell together, not that every detail at the larp is historically correct. We have chosen which parts of the history we feel are most important for everyone to know about to tell a cohesive story. As a participant, you will not need to research anything yourself to play, only read the material given to you by the organisers.

Lastly, The One Without Sin is a larp with both male and female characters full of their own motivations and relationships, but it is a larp focused on women’s history. There were men convicted of witchcraft, but during the Swedish witch trials, they were few and not nearly as vulnerable to accusations as women. When The One Without Sin was first written (in Swedish in 2017), few historical larps focused on the ordinary woman’s life and experience – she often had to be extraordinary, or act like a man historically might have, for her story to be interesting enough. Making a larp about women’s history is therefore, for us, a feminist act, and an act of rebellion against the traditional narrative.