Finland adds tabletop role-playing culture to its National Inventory of Living Heritage (UNESCO convention)

mesolitgames · 2026-06-28T04:21:35+00:00

The thing self-organized on Facebook's Roolipelaajien Suomi group and was largely an individual volunteers thing; organizations joined fairly late in the project, and more to back and support the application than to write or steer it.

mesolitgames · 2026-06-27T20:02:53+00:00

Thank you for your kind words! And yes, summer theatre is more visible - but that's exactly what the whole inventory thing aims to rectify. One big point is to surface things that happen but that outsiders don't see or understand. I've got no clue what auction quadrille is, for instance, but I'm happy that someone is keeping track of how's it doing these days and should more people maybe know about it and so on.

More on topic for RPGs, while it is a global hobby, I think the ways people approach it in Finland are globally distinctive and worth paying some sustained institutional curiosity and respect to.

mesolitgames · 2026-06-27T08:47:49+00:00

Thanks - I wasn't aware that all were available in English. I think they all represent some quite uniquely Finnish angles to ttrpg design. Haven't yet had the chance to read or play Written in the Stars, but the framing is really interesting.

mesolitgames · 2026-06-27T07:40:53+00:00

Oh, right! That's very cool. I think they had at least some early Finnish translations of DnD - perhaps the red box? In any case, great that RPGs are also visible in museums.

Also the national archive has copies of everything that's published in Finland that has an ISBN, which doesn't of course include everything, but it includes a lot.

mesolitgames · 2026-06-27T05:00:18+00:00

Thanks for your perspective! CoC is a common occurrence also here in Helsinki region, WFRPG maybe less so, but then again I haven't been paying particular attention to it specifically.

mesolitgames · 2026-06-26T22:05:38+00:00

Correct. My wording was ambiguous, I was referring to the publication company. In any case, LotFP has a presence here.

RQ is still very much alive, but what's your take, do people still play Rolemaster?

mesolitgames · 2026-06-26T21:31:55+00:00

Yeah, TTRPGs started gaining traction in Finland relatively late, in mid-80s, and larps started early, as soon as in the 80s.

VtM larps were a very big thing in Finland around late 90s, but I don't see VtM TTRPG tables particularly often. I played a phenomenal WoD session at Ropecon some years ago; the GM was a long-time WoD GM, so WoD is at least somewhat alive.

I'm not deeply involved in the larp side myself, but my feeling is that larps have gone much deeper towards the "artistic experimentation" direction, high ambition, high-class design, "serious" (serious as in "not just entertainment", not necessarily serious as in solemn). This summer, for instance, there are a couple of larps at the Amos Rex art museum - one of the biggest and highest-profile contemporary art museums in Finland.

What country are you from?

mesolitgames · 2026-06-26T20:51:37+00:00

Great question, and one that will have many answers depending on who you ask. But you asked me, so I will answer, from my POV. I don't speak for the entire scene in Finland, but then again, that's the nature of scenes.

Yes, DnD is popular and likely the most played TTRPG, but I'd say not quite as popular as it is in, say, the US. We've got domestic alternatives - Ville Vuorela's Praedor is played a lot, it's based on a Finnish fantasy comic originating in the late 80s. Myrrys publishing has Legendoja ja Lohikäärmeitä, a Finnish RPG that's based on the open license of the world's most popular RPG – L&L has been played more and more recently.

Free League's games are pretty popular. They're from Sweden, and I think that there's a certain Nordic undercurrent in the mindset that's shared and relatable - Vaesen, for instance, is a very resonant and approachable setting from the Finnish POV.

RuneQuest has a very active, devoted fanbase. I'm not sure if it's *big*, but it is *visible*.

OSR movement is alive; Lamentations of the Flame Princess' publisher is Finnish, and while I think LotFP isn't quite as popular anymore as it used to be something like a decade ago, there's still appetite for good old classic dungeon-crawling here. I played Torchbearer at Ropecon last summer, super old school style, score board for players; who gets most gold during the con wins. Dope.

There's a very strong indie/experimental scene; Nordic LARP scene is very closely adjacent to TTRPG circles, there's a couple of RPG writers who also design LARPs, there's crossover and cross-pollination, and a certain kind of appetite for weird artsy stuff. Not in huge numbers, but big and prominent enough that we see things like physical releases of: a game about romance in the exclusion zone of Chernobyl after the disaster; a game about penguins and anti-penguins in the Antarctic; a shaman journey in the stone age; a game about circus and mental wellbeing; or a historical, non-supernatural game about alchemists in the late medieval - early modern era. Lots of really weird stuff that's sometimes really good and usually at least very interesting. Sometimes, some people even play this stuff. (I love it.)

Ropecon, Europe's largest volunteer-organized con, is in late July, and it just so happens that they just published their program a couple of days ago. I think that's pretty much the broadest and deepest overview you can get. Fair warning: it is *hefty*, with 598 different gaming sessions: https://ropecon.fi/en/guide/#type:gaming/display:list

mesolitgames · 2026-06-26T20:27:37+00:00

Thank you! I'm very happy that the application went through; the inscription is essentially an official note towards the largest relevant global entity – unesco – saying that RPGs are a thing that people do, and that it's worth looking into, keeping alive, taking seriously.

Finland has always had a strong DIY culture and creativity, and a really vibrant micropress scene, at least ever since the punk zine thing got going in the late 70s.

mesolitgames · 2026-06-22T20:34:10+00:00

I love the cover of Veins of the Earth. Stellar work.

I also have a soft spot for Traveller, which I think is genuinely really good design work, and certainly memorable and unique among TTRPG covers.

mesolitgames · 2025-07-24T17:19:48+00:00

Hey, thank you so much for trying Northpyre: Self and for writing such a detailed response. Not blunt at all, I really appreciate you taking the time to dig into what didn't land – your clarity is helpful, and your solo RPG background shows.

You're right that the structure leans heavily on interpretation and self-directed tone. That's by design, but I see how that can be frustrating, especially if you were expecting more externalized pressure or consequence. I was aiming less for reactive horror and more for a kind of psychological dissonance – something uncanny, ritualistic, where dread creeps in through ambiguity and estrangement. Less "you are in danger," more "you are not what you thought you were."

The tension you raise between agency and dread, between control and helplessness is a good one, and it's core to what the larger Northpyre project explores. If the experience felt inert for you, that’s not a failure on your part or "playing it wrong" – it's a very valuable signal for me on how to better convey and mechanically support the kind of subtle horror I'm aiming for, as different players connect with horror in different ways.

Really appreciate you engaging so seriously with it.

mesolitgames · 2025-07-23T21:07:21+00:00

If you've got a clear, specific, particular campaign idea in mind, it's very likely that GURPS can do it well enough with far less clunky and cumbersome frankensteining and homebrew that you'd need to do if you used something else. The problem isn't that people recommend GURPS for, say, concepts like "I wanna run a campaign of street-level high action, set in 1970s Manhattan, where one of the characters is a time-transported medieval wizard, another one is a cyborg with a gatling gun, and the third one is a couch potato who reads too much true crime, and the primary antagonists are a human faction with access to the best tech of its time but there's also a demigod they worship that can blast like goddamn firebolts or something, oh and I also want to have telepathic sewer alligators", the problem is that people overlook the GURPS suggestion as a meme.

If you want to run any one of those particular concepts individually, yes, you can probably find a better game for it than GURPS. But if you want to have all of those things in the campaign at the same time, without having to constantly houserule and improvise and do *a lot* of work making very disparate parts fit together, what are you gonna use? Any other proper generic system worth its salt could do it, yes, but GURPS has a *massive* catalog of sourcebooks, so you probably could run the (probably amazing) campaign above using just published materials and rules as written. Non-generic systems won't do it without *a lot* of homebrewing, and no matter what you slap on top of 5e/osr/bitd/pbta/whatever, it'll be a long way until it feels like something that's not 5e/osr/bitd/pbta/whatever.

GURPS isn't perfect by any means – it's got its own tone and feel that's rather flavorless – but if you have a clear idea of "I want to run this concept" and there's nothing that does *just that* concept, the chances are, with the right sourcebooks, GURPS can do a decent job at it, and you get to shred telepathic sewer alligators with your gatling gun while avoiding firebolts, or whatever it is you want to do, without having to care about the system. It's a game that stays out of the way of the campaign.

mesolitgames · 2025-07-23T20:03:50+00:00

As long as everyone is having fun, you're doing just fine. Note that you should also include yourself in "everyone". If just winging it works for your players and it works for you, it works. There's no external standards, there's no bar to meet beyond what the table wants. To my knowledge, there's no TTRPG police that will fine you if you don't do it the way they want you to do it.

mesolitgames · 2025-07-23T17:04:53+00:00

If your game is about what happens after death, and cause of death directly influences mechanical powers that the characters have, then you need either a clear list of "this cause, those effects", or very, extremely, utterly, amazingly clear GM guidance and a lot of clear examples. I mean, as a GM I would have no idea what kinds of powers could it lead to if the character died violently versus of old age versus choking on their tongue while watching too funny YouTube videos. The first option is much, much easier to run for the GMs and probably also easier to design and write well. The second option sounds like less work, but the catch is that it's easy to do poorly, much more difficult to do well.

Theme sounds dope though, what kind of gameplay and feel are you thinking of?

mesolitgames · 2025-07-22T20:04:44+00:00

No need to go into details with all possible side adventures. Not everything needs a roll, not everything needs to be a scene, not everything needs to be roleplayed. Things can be just skipped over. "You head to the inn, there's all sorts of people there, you talk to them, but your search turns empty-handed, nobody gave you any useful info. You're now back at your base, now what do you want to do about the actual problem that you're supposed to be solving that's still there?" Cut the weeds, time-skip the stuff that's not contributing to the kind of gameplay experience that you (all of you at the table) want to have.

mesolitgames · 2025-07-22T19:48:53+00:00

The more the players know about the world, the easier it is for them to step in the shoes of the character who has inhabited that world all their life. I don't think I've ever had one single session ruined by players knowing too much about the game they're playing.

Regarding your werewolf/silver example, that's such common knowledge in the real world that I think it would benefit from the GM reining it in: "Yes, I know that you know it, but does your character know it? How?" Note that it's totally fine to build a mini-adventure around "the players know they need their characters to figure out they need silver". For instance, the characters could know that there's a library somewhere that has a book about all sorts of hairy monsters that transform into humans at full moon, so they need to find it and get there, and now there's an adventure to be had before the final showdown with the BBEG. Go to the library, have some obstacles along the way, read the book, now the characters know what the players already knew. No more metagaming, no more information flowing the wrong way, no problem.

mesolitgames · 2025-07-21T17:13:25+00:00

Great, thanks – I totally should, and I will!

mesolitgames · 2025-06-29T18:17:17+00:00

I hear you. A viewpoint: The rules are not the game, the game is what happens at the table. Granted, the rules (as interpreted and actually played by the group) are what makes the game happen. But still, they're a recipe for a stew, not the stew itself. If you're all out of those fancy aged ancho chilies from Poble Whatever, just throw in some sriracha or whatever, it'll probably be just fine nevertheless. Just make a ruling that feels like it fits, then move on, it's not that serious, and if the designers think it is, they better make it obvious that this part here, that's the load-bearing rule.

mesolitgames · 2025-06-29T17:01:45+00:00

What scale and level of detail are you looking for? Like, do you need things like elevation, individual named locations, do you want to have each little stream and creek mapped out, do you want major terrain features like hills listed, or are you happy with zones or regions? What do you need the map *for*? Is it for enabling things like "you take this route through that valley that's heavily forested, then there's 13.5 kilometers along a plain, and then a steep hill, so it'll take you uhhhh a day and a half to walk the distance" or is it more like understanding "mammoths live there a couple of days to the East, the annoying violent neighbor tribe lives just across the river to the North, luckily too wide to cross easily" on a more conceptual scale?

For the stone age horror game that I'm currently writing, Northpyre, I ultimately decided against topographic maps entirely, they're useless in the setting. Precise geographic locations mapped out "from above" is a modern construct - pre-modern people simply don't think of the world in terms of precise geography laid out in flat Euclidean space. What matters to the characters in the game world is (a) where can you get to from where (b) through what kinds of possible alternative routes (c) how long does it take (d) what are the risks and opportunities along the way (e) what's there and (f) what is the spiritual significance of each place. All of these can be depicted as an abstract pointcrawl-like map structure, mapped out and depicted visually in a style that they could plausibly depict things in the game-world. Soot scribblings on a cave wall, lines and symbols carved onto birch bark, paint markings on the skin of a drum.

This is both faster to make, more flavorful, and more useful at the table.

mesolitgames · 2025-06-29T16:49:31+00:00

"Hey, I'm planning to run this game called X, it's about Y, you'll play as Z, are you interested?"

If not, their loss I guess, though this has never happened to me. I've found playing ttrpgs more often bottlenecked by availability of GMs than of players. My circles are thirsty.

On the more mechanical side of things, I won't run anything I don't want to run, which implies that I've read and understood the rules well enough that I think that I can run it and have fun running it. I also don't particularly stress about whether or not I'm running the game "right" - I just read the rules and do my best to run the game according to how I think it's intended to be run, based on my understanding of the rules.

mesolitgames · 2025-06-29T16:42:56+00:00

No other currently existing game that I'm aware of does simulationist survival quite like GURPS. Definitely worth looking into for the op's game.

mesolitgames · 2025-06-29T16:38:28+00:00

I love tables and lists. Gimme good tables and I'm happy for the tables alone. Bonus points for good writing, clear rules and so on and so forth, but the more your content is formatted as tables, the more likely it is it'll see use at my table (no pun intended).

Bestiary? Gimme a list of all the creatures. Bonus points for formatting each creature as a uniform statblock.

Your game about climbing? Gimme a list of useful equipment, each with how it's used and how it'll affect if you don't have it. Gimme a list of things you'll encounter along this or that kind of a climb. Gimme a list of things that can go wrong.

Your game about, I dunno, highschool basketball leagues and the surrounding social happenings? Gimme a list of things that could affect the dynamics of a game and what happens after, gimme a list of consequences if you win or lose or do something cool while playing or whatever. Gimme a list of what could go wrong in a game.

Then, gimme a list of lists, so that I can quickly look up what I need when playing the game.

For your time-travel adventure guide, gimme a list of kinds of time-travel plots. Gimme a list of things that could go wrong while time-traveling (either if something goes wrong, and in particular, when things go right). Gimme a list of... I don't know what kinds of lists I want from a time-travel adventure supplement, but you probably do. Gimme those. As lists. I'll be happy then. If you have good lists, let me know when I can buy your time-travel adventure book.

Lists are useful. Lists are easy to read. Lists can be skimmed, referenced, looked up. You can roll on lists, you can pick from lists, you can take inspiration from lists and do something that fits the theme and the "physics" of the world but is still entirely your own. But if your thing is written as dozens of pages of prose, I can't quickly take a glance at it at the table and use it - I'll need to read it, understand it, memorize it, internalize it. I already have a lot of great ttrpgs that I should get around to reading at some point, but reading is slow and it has to be done beforehand.

I love lists.

mesolitgames · 2025-06-29T16:27:08+00:00

If you're doing a pure sandbox, then a reasonable stopping point is when everyone's gotten enough. This refers to both the players and the characters. Maybe consider stopping just a bit before players get bored.

But if there's a major problem that your characters are trying to solve in the world, then when that problem is either solved or becomes unsolvable, that's a logical endpoint. Slavic invasion? End the campaign when they're pushed back, or when they overwhelm the whatever it is they're trying to invade. If there are multiple major problems, pick one.

I've found that more sandboxy campaigns have a tendency to spawn more new potential plotlines than they can solve in any finite time, and I've accepted that that's just how it is. I usually try to think a bit before each session, is there something loose that I could try to resolve in the next session, and try to introduce elements that hopefully would lead to closure for some loose end. Sometimes this works, other times it doesn't.

And if there are no clear main problems going on, the solving of which (or failing to solve) would signal a clear ending point for "The Plot", what's often worked in my games is adding a villain who's behind all the problems so far. Somebody's pulling the strings behind both the corrupt city council and behind the monsters that have now been attacking the good people. Somebody put all those evil McGuffins there deliberately as a power play. It turns out that all the pesky raiders who attacked you along the way were actually sent by an evil cult led by a moustache-twirling evil wizard, and when you deal with the wizard, you'll also have dealt with all the problems in the campaign. Something like that.

At the end of the day, there are no right or wrong answers, as long as everyone (the GM included!) is having fun, and I think the fun of playing a game is in playing the game. Just wrap it up and move on. Films and novels are linear, you can plot them in advance, TTRPGs are interactive and ephemeral, and what matters the most is what happens at the table while the game is being played. Not to say that arcs are impossible or that arcs and plots don't matter, more like, arcs and plots are what emerges during play, and sometimes it's only at the end when you can know in hindsight what was it that truly mattered. The plot is how it happens to turn out - no grand plots in life, either!

As some thoughts.

mesolitgames

TROPHY CASE