How Did Dziobak Llow Studios Lose Its Magic

Cheyenne Imvula had never been to a school for witches. Or in Poland, for that matter. But that was about to change.

Rain, cosplayer and makeup artist who posted tutorial videos on it YouTube, unveiled her messages on Facebook one day in December 2016 to receive an invitation to attend a long weekend at a public school. Czocha College was famous as one of the first places to study magic, offering courses in subjects such as alchemy, conflux studies, invocation, and the magical imagination, all within the halls of the 800-year-old castle entering the jungles of southern Poland.

The school's organizers wanted Mvula to attend for free, by shooting a video of the event and covering it on her YouTube channel. He said: “I was very happy. "I felt it was going to change the game." In March 2017, Rachel boarded a plane to Berlin, where a bus would take her to Poland. As soon as he arrived at the Czocha Palace, Rain would name another: Willow Jones, a witch. This is because Czocha Castle was a preparation for the Wizardry College, a Harry PotterIt's endless light.

What is developing, from "live-action-play," is part of the analog game and the development theater. Rain had been fascinating for years, and he was not alone. Lights around the world dreamed of going to Wizardry College. Dziobak Larp Studios, a Danish-Polish company that uses College Wizardry, had made a name for themselves after some of the world's finest, well-produced bugs.

The whole weekend has been a dream of a magical fever. Rain's character, Willow, was a technology machine, the kind of magical engineer reminiscent of Arthur Weasley. He wasn't a numbers man in real life, but that didn't matter. His teammates welcomed Willow no matter how much the rain played. “It really amazed me how much everyone cares about telling a good story and working with others, not just winning a game,” said Rain.

The following year, Rain had been to the Dziobak worms as a mixture of participants and influence. His travel expenses were unpaid, but free and reduced tickets continue to come as long as he continues to post videos of his grand arrival. At first, he was happy. He has to return, back, to the closest Hogwarts have ever been to.

The dream does not last long. As he got closer and closer to the company's operations, Rain began to wonder if the company leadership was paying enough attention to allegations of sexual misconduct, workplace harassment, and power differences at the scene. He is particularly concerned when a Dziobak employee sends a highly publicized letter to one of Rain's friends, also a co-conspirator with Dziobak, revealing full details of the larger lives and threatening his safety.

In addition, the rain was slowly coming to realize that Dziobak was always on the verge of financial collapse. "Gradually, it started to get a little sad," she said. For a moment, he tore it up: Dziobak's worms are one of the most revolutionary things he's ever been to, but what was the price? By August of 2018, he had made up his mind, and cut ties with Dziobak.

On March 5, 2019, Dziobak closed his mouth. For most Wizardry College news, the news is shocking. But for Rain, and everyone else who had worked with Dziobak, it has always been a question of whether, if not, this seemingly powerful statement is a twist. Allegations of financial misconduct, mismanagement of staff, and sexual harassment have been the subject of controversy that Dziobak and its CEO Claus Raast have for years. Dziobak was not a stone fortress, but a house of cards.

In the aftermath of the recent tragedy, even those who knew him were unsure of what had happened. The Swedish production company has come in to save the events at College Wizardry for which tickets have been sold, and fans have put in more than $ 100,000 in Indiegogo to make sure the events are going on as planned. The College of Wizardry would survive, but under the hand of another company entirely. The company's other worms, Downton Abbey-inspired Fairweather Manor and the vampire-themed Convention of Thorns, have been discontinued.

Over the past six months, Kotaku interviewed nine people hired by Dziobak as full-time employees, part-time contractors, or unpaid volunteers. Some of them have spoken anonymously, for fear of retaliation against both of them from former Dziobak executives and the much larger public. They described a company that was looking for too much work to make very little money, based on the assumption that employees would accept bad conditions if they got a dream job. Salaries were delayed, invoices were unpaid, and consolidation that might have saved the company collapsed. Dziobak's leaders, shaken by the constant stigma in the growing community, fought hard to sell tickets while earning money.

During further negotiations, Rasder widely acknowledged his earlier claims that Dziobak's unrelated funding was part of the company's deferral. Dziobak's financial situation is starting to worsen as the years pass, he said, and workers' compensation has been "a major problem." Months of research had begun to set up enough salaries for Polish workers, he said, and while Polish workers were paid less than Denmark, he felt this was right. However, he acknowledged that no one in the group received the most money. Raasted said the Dziobak workers were nearby, and all served the common purpose of light construction. There was no discrimination or harassment at work.

After the majority of Dziobak's senior staff resigned en masse in October of 2018, the company was able to stay open for another five months. But Claus Raasted said he had no choice but to close Dziobak next March. "I had borrowed money from everyone I could and I was left with a debt of over $ 1,000,000," he said in an email. "Everything I owned was deposited in that company, and I will spend the rest of my life paying off those debts."

And, as Dziobak immersed himself into the financial hole, games were played that everyone admitted to were life-changing.

Larging has been around for decades. It just had a problem with the light issue. When they hear the word “larp,” many people still think of the video clip, 2003, of a dead man, running behind someone and shouting “Lightning! Lightning bolt!" as often as he tosses the bean bags into one of his fellow members wearing a fat potato sack.

But as nerd culture continues to become more saturated with mass distribution, the discomfort has diminished. And nothing announces its greatest potential for regeneration than the promotional video for College Wizardry that was published in December of 2014. Extended shooting showed a stone fort, complete with turrets, towers, and a large stone bridge, built in dense forests in Poland. Inside the palace, witches worked on alembics in candlesticks, made their wanderings in libraries filled with old books, and danced with witches in the great hall. The video promises all the magic of Harry Potter, in this case only the real – the real, that is, for anyone with the guts, imagination, and money to travel to Czocha Castle. College of Wizardry was a lot easier, yes, but as far from Lightning Bolt Man as one can get.

The College of Wizardry was identified close to its founder. A long, wide-eyed dancer with a beard, Claus Raasted has appeared in promotional videos to combine the exuberance and warmth of Rubeus Hagrid with a special Sirius Black instrument. "Have you ever dreamed of being a witch or a witch?" as he entered one 2015 video of The Wizardry College. "Maybe I can help."

The media has covered the videos relentlessly. “Poland's spy school is a priority for Hogwarts,” it read The subject of a It's hot the story as of December 4, 2014. The middle section People announced that the College of Wizardry "might be the only way to get Harry Potter fans." For anyone hoping that a letter from Hogwarts could come by post one day, the Wizardry College seemed a miracle. There was something behind all the hype, too. Participants described the beauty of the place and what it wore as a top-notch, very detailed detail, a centuries-old palace just as beautiful as it looks on film.

"It's a sad time when you're walking across the bridge," said Cheyenne Imvula, an American beet participant in eight Dziobak events. "We all cry when we first see the castle."

“The first thing most people would say is: & # 39; Thank you, thank you, thank you for changing my life, & # 39; said Philip Jacobius, a former producer at Dziobak. it was life changing. ”

Getting to the Czocha castle for the first time requires a big financial purchase. First up was the cost of tickets, which started at 180 euros (about $ 199) in 2014 but quickly climbed to $ 375 (about $ 415) if Dziobak ever realized what people would pay for his work. Then there is the cost of travel. For European participants, airlines cost about 100 euros ($ 110), but for Americans and Canadians, that figure could be significantly higher. An American cone from a city center such as New York City can expect to pay, at least, about $ 500 per round trip to Wroclaw or Prague, while a worm from a city with a small airport may require much larger space.

In addition there were taxis, buses, hotels and airports. Nicole Winchester, a Canadian actress who first participated and eventually adopted Dziobak's strategic plans, said traveling as a participant would cost her about $ 1000 to $ 1500 per lather, with costs and services costing anywhere from $ 75 to $ 300 a weekend.

"Ticket prices for young organizers are actually hell," Winchester said. "An all-inclusive pricing plan and paying everyone right while not making players scream & # 39; robbing the highway & # 39; is near impossible. But, he said," it's perfectly okay to criticize high-value gulls for being inaccessible. " who stick to their finances each year to Lesna, Poland, and they would pay anything to get inside the magic they liked.

Dziobak's long range had no sharp points, dice, and mana. Math didn't play at all. Growing up at Wizardry College is like an additional trev show where the players were the audience. While everything was meant to feel comfortable and comfortable, in reality the light was firmly edited by Dziobak's authors.

There was a bizarre drive that drew the whole red scheme, such as the sorting of new students in the five houses of Durentius, Libussa, Sendivogius, Faust, and Molin, and a large group on the last day of the lemonade. Then there is a relationship between the individual characters. Participants can choose between creating their own character or receiving a character sheet written by the College Wizardry team. The characters had complex backstories with distinct motives intended to perpetuate them in scenes with other main characters. Participants also use Facebook teams made up of each of the lightest runs to establish relationships with other players. Using the “Seeking Relationship” post on Facebook groups as a way to communicate, young chefs can decide if their characters are best friends, for example, lovers, or siblings.

During the light itself, which will run from Thursday evening and run until the following Sunday, the players use all those pre-formed structures as spring boards to create enhanced scenes. The result: All participants get the chance to live in amazing arcs as compelling as any other by J.K. Rowling. Which is the point, after all.

"When people ask us, & # 39; Why do we have to participate in such a surprise? & # 39; The answer is simple," said Aleksandra Ososinska, associate dean of Wizardry College, promotional video for Dziobak. "It's the same as being a part of a movie where everyone is at the forefront of their story."

“The most important factor is the freedom in the design of people; the characters, the world and, ultimately, the experience, ”says Claus Raasted.

The College of Wizardry has made hundreds of participants' dreams come true. Several people described the interactions they had with the College of Wizardry as one of the most sensitive and logical tasks of their major careers.

“There was a moment when I was standing on a bridge in Czocha. We had to keep one of my friends, someone in my house, in Durentius, ”said Winchester, describing the first Wizardry College he attended. “I was a healer. It was just me. And I was standing there and the time was counting. There was & # 39; blood & # 39; in my hands which he describes. I watched the blood in my hands shining from the lights going down, and I was like, & # 39; Oh, my God, this is real. This is possible. & # 39; ”

Returning home he felt as if he were literally entering after a vivid and mysterious dream, and Winchester knew that he should return to Poland as soon as possible. Not only did he purchase a ticket for not only the Wizardry College, but also the Convent of Thorns as well.

There are other worms around the world, but most are not very close to the production values ​​delivered by Dziobak. Many lights do everything they can find: a nearby park, lots of wood, behind a large area. Those bumps can be as constructive and evolving for players, but they also require an additional suspension of disbelief. The Wizardry College needed to do very little – as Raasted put it, the castle "just screams the school & # 39; wizard. & # 39;"

It wasn't hard for the players to pretend they were actually in a European castle, covered by hidden bees and built in 1240. They really did get the hats and forearms, even if the last one wasn't working. In classes, professors actually gave lectures on topics such as technology and the idea of ​​traditional magic.

There was something special, too, about flying to the airport in Dresden, Wroclaw, or Prague, and then taking the bus to the small Polish town of Lesna, where there is Czocha Castle. Lesna is part of Silesia, a region that includes parts of Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic. The Silesian province comprises the largest of Poland's largest forest, with about 100 castles. It's a place designed to be organized for folktales and dreams.

All of this makes the College of Wizardry a "place of light," or a worldwide holiday alarm as a play. Dziobak marketed the College of Wizardry as a lifetime experience, and it was no joke. The game, which brought out all the unparalleled standing of its players, was one person.

But these kinds of experiences don't just go out overnight. It has taken talented people to work for months on end creating worms. Sometimes, these workers jump at the chance to do the dream job, and later regret it.

In 2008, at the age of 15, Agata Swistak decided that she would use bedbugs to survive.

This was not an easily achievable goal. Swistak grew up in Katowice, an industrial city in the Silesian part of Poland. Compared to the ancient Nordic culture of growing up, the Polish colony was relatively small, and there were no games in Katowice. But an hour outside the city was a garden where, during the holiday season, a few hundred stakes came together to camp, drink beer, and play with a series of short worms. Swistak tagged along with his friend's family for one year, and fell in love. The first light started as a scene in daily life, but the editor then revealed that the actors were dead. The arrangement evolved into an underground scene, where players had to judge the trapped souls between heaven and hell. Swistak was energized by the creativity and enthusiasm of the participants. "I felt like it was a big deal, and people should have heard about it," he said.

Swistak began to arrange bugs for his friends. Within a year, he and several other Polish lolders decided to start a nonprofit, demanding money through a European Union program that provides such organizations to startups. In 2012, Swistak and his team launched Liveform, which quickly became the largest official carpenter site in Poland. Their headliner game, a dieselpunk nightmare called the New Age, quickly became one of Poland's biggest worms. Three years after Swistak vowed to use bedbugs as a career, he was on his way to the age of 19.

If Swistak wanted to be known for his work outside of Poland, however, he would have to start participating in the Nordic international arena. That highlighted a major issue with the Nordic larp: the economic difference between the Eastern European larrel and the Scandinavian scale. "If it's too expensive, let's say 275 euros, it's a weekend trip for Danish residents earning 4000 euros a month," said Swistak. "It's totally unacceptable for Polish people who earn 600 euros a month."

By volunteering at Knutpunkt, the governing body in the Nordic countries, Swistak and his largest party were willing to admit, even though the cost of travel was still very expensive.

In 2014, Dracan Dembinski, president of Liveform, ran into Claus Raasted at the Knututunkunk event. A key figure in the Nordic lather scene, Raasted has been two abortion organizations: Rollespilsfabrikken, a non-profit using baby glasses, and Rollespilsakademiet, a for-profit company that offers great educational benefits. He was often the featured speaker at each Knutut conference. It was 4:00 a.m., both men were drunk, and Knututunk's creative environment was contagious. The ensuing discussion became part of Dziobak's founding hands; He will be releasing this story in a 2016 edition entitled The Book of College of Wizardry.

Raasted and Dembinski share a wish to wear a themed Harry Potter weed in a palace that looked like Hogwarts. Dembinski, however, actually had a price list for renting various castles in Poland. You were raised can't believe how cheap things were in Poland. He could rent the entire castle for $ 25,000 over a long weekend.

"If you are right about this," Rasasted said, "we should talk more if we are healthy."

Within a week of the discussions, the College of Wizardry's live website is live. The only details translated into it were the date, location, other photos of Czocha Castle, and the theme: Hogwarts, but the university-aged brothers. Raasted had started "selling tickets before going to the venue," Swistak said, "before meeting anyone in the group." The light, which will be produced in partnership between Liveform and the nonprofit Rollespilsfabrikken has been sold out in two days. One hundred and thirty-eight people spent $ 200 per person on a light that happened eight months later, with no idea what it would entail.

Other members of Liveform were concerned about the high turnover and lack of organization, and did not participate in the formation of the Wizardry College. Swistak was on the ship from the beginning. She just turned 20. She has enrolled in university courses three times, but it was not her actual school. A magical school, though … To compose one not only seemed fun, it was something to do with his time. Swistak has volunteered to help collaborate with volunteers, which is an integral part of the creative world that combines stage design and experiential design.

In June, Raasted and the Rollespilsfabrikken team met Liveform at Czocha Castle for the first time. "We were attacked by this place," Swistak said. "It was amazing." Danish and Polish teams set the framework for the Wizardry College while it was at the Czocha level. Light will be a voluntary effort, they decided. Ticket sales will go to the center, food and viewing costs. Either Liveform or Rollespilsfabrikken won't make any money.

As November approached, Swistak and the rest of the team were in fear. What if the lights didn't fall under the tower's design, the way they had? What if they could interpret the magic of Harry Potter for three full days of being full?

They need not worry. The first Wizardry College was a roaring success. Participants played Quidditch in the yard, ran into the Dark Arts in the basement, headed to Forbired Forest, where volunteers introduced magical creatures such as leprechauns and werewolves. According to Raasted, a survey of players found that more than 80 percent of the attendees said it was the best thing they had ever done.

Rollespilsfabrikken and Liveform were holding a lightning bolt on the bottle, which was obvious to everyone involved. It was also visible to anyone who watched the promotional video coming out next month and introduced The Wizardry College in the language of the news.

In the video, the principal of Czocha College of Wizardry stands on a sculpture balloon of the castle's main hall as stolen students enter. He also speaks in a stirring speech from Dumbledore's lines on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Rock: "You are all welcome this year to return to Czocha. Now, it does not mean living in dreams and forgetting about life." The camera goes across the hall, showing the entrance faces of the students wearing them. "I would like to announce that the Dark Forest is no longer on the border."

No promo taken was a chronic problem behind the scenes. Some clothing and accessories arrived late – "prisoners came into the yard while I was opening the opening forum," Raasted said. Behind the stage, the racing volunteers always tried to keep the game from disappearing. "For the organization, this was a big problem," Swistak said. “I don't know how we managed to drive it. No one is prepared. ”

At one point, the drivers of the lights almost caused property damage to the old palace – which, of course, would not be a major problem. “In Poland, there is something you can do. In Poland, nobody cares. Want to make a hole in the wall? You can. Just hide it, or buy vodka and take it to adoptive mothers, ”Swistak said, rolling his eyes.

"It happened," he said. One of the guests knocked down an expensive marble statue of a staircase after the war. A volunteer, Swistak said, "instructed the people to put it where it was. He took two bottles of vodka, went to the receptionist, and said, & # 39; You've seen nothing. Here's vodka. & # 39;" things about the palace.

Just a few weeks after the first College of Wizardry, the team announced a second championship. They also decided to make the rest of their puppies profitable. According to Raasted Rollespilsfabrikken he has taken an economic risk with the Wizardry College and hurt nearly 4,000 euros ($ 4,454) in debt. Nobody wanted that to happen again. Until 2016, Liveform, Rollespilsfabrikken, and Rollespilsakademiet will continue to handle bedbugs at the highest level of foreign banking. In 2016, teams created Dziobak Larp Studios as a brand name to reduce confusion.

While the bugs were a joint venture between members of the Danish and Polish companies, the Danish team handled all the funds, the headquarters were in Copenhagen, and Raasted was in charge. Danish funds even paid rent to the headquarters of Liveform in Poland. All of this seemed reasonable at the time, because Raasted was the greatest experience attached to the Wizardry College and had experience in trading with profitable businesses. "All the financial strength was mine," Raasted said.

Swistak used to support itself as it continued its commitment with Dziobak in the second and third runs of the Wizardry College. After the third run, he realized he could no longer excuse himself by giving too much time to Dziobak for free. “I was forcing myself to go and speak to Claus and told him I would no longer be volunteering. He will have to hire me, or he no longer has a professional photographer and volunteer organizer for his events, ”Swistak said. "Before I started the conversation, he offered me a job."

As the official volunteer coordinator, Swistak was still Dziobak's contractor. Her first salary was 2000 zł Polish monthly, or about $ 500. While that figure would be lower in crime in the U.S., it was slightly higher than the Polish minimum wage. "It was a good salary to get in and do what I love in Poland," Swistak said.

Raasted also recruited other team members who had made the first Wizardry college. None of them, including Swistak, had any legal contracts. Instead, they are signing underwriting agreements. The contracts did not mean tax deductions or health insurance, so Polish contractors had to take advantage of the minefields on their own. Swistak's parents helped her pay for health insurance costs, but some Polish workers were less fortunate, and they left.

Raasted said he was looking at various solutions to help Polish workers pay less in taxes. One solution involved placing them all as sex workers because sex work is legal, and inexpensive, in Poland. In the end, he said, "we decided not to do that."

By the end of 2015, the Wizardry College had two departments, separated by nationality: Danish administrators and boots down to Poland. At first, this was not a problem. Fueled by its initial success, the team that was to become Dziobak began planning another two broader games. Fairweather Manor, introduced in 2015, was a Downton AbbeyThe magnificent light takes place at Moszna Castle, which is a two-hour drive from Lesna. While Fairweather, like the College of Wizardry, was simply inspired by the source material, another simple, Convention of Thorns, had legitimate licenses Vampire: Masquerade event. It takes place in 2016 in Książ, the largest and most carefully restored palace in Silesia.

All three of these worms gave free tickets, or otherwise free travel, to participants who agreed to work as an NPC. The NPC, short for a non-player character, often becomes an experience, much like a music band member, playing whatever role is required on the scene, simply falling into many parts of the weekend. Players can make temporary requests for specific NPCs to play scenes with them, roles that are often requested including family members, themes and magical creatures. During the Dziobak larp run, players can come to the NPC's headquarters, submit an NPC request, and receive a "taxi place" later that day.

It was Swistak's job to complete the NPC list with each light, make sure each NPC goes from the airport to the castle, and holds the NPC's headquarters for the entire weekend. The work was hard, but he loved it. Temporary.

When Claus Raasted launched the College Wizardry in 2014, he was still one of the most well-known carpenters in the Nordic countries. Njengenhloko yezinkampani ezimbili ezivuthayo, uRaasted wayesezakhele idumela njengesipika esiguquguqukayo esixuba intshiseko nomdlandla. Ubekhuluma cishe njalo ngonyaka kwengqungquthela ye-Knutpunkt larping, ebibanjelwa ezweni elehlukile leNordic unyaka nonyaka. Ngamava akhe, ukumamatheka kwakhe okubanzi, futhi nokukholwa kwakhe okufana nobuntwana emandleni okuzala, uRaasted waba ngumuntu wemvelo weKolishi LaseWizardry.

Kepha ubedume njengomuntu ongazi ukuthi uzoyeka nini umdlalo obe yingozi. Phakathi konyaka we-2014 nowe-2019, amahemuhemu amathathu ayezama ukugcotshwa kuwo wonke amalambu: ukuthi wayebaxosha (futhi kwesinye isikhathi ehlukumeza) abesifazane ngesikhathi semicimbi kaDziobak; ukuthi wasizakala ngomsebenzi wezisebenzi zasePoland ezazinganxephezwanga ngokwanele; nokuthi wenza namabhizinisi ayingozi emazweni angaphandle.

URaasted uthe wahlangana nabesifazane ngezimpisi, kodwa wakwenqaba ngokuphelele ukuhlukumeza noma ngubani. Uvumile ukuthi akekho umuntu okhokhelwa ngokwanele ngomsebenzi wabo, kodwa wathi nguyena othatha ubungozi bebhizinisi lelo. Futhi uvumile ngokukhululeka ukuthi akazi ukuthi yini angena kuyo ngephrojekthi ngayinye, kodwa ukuthi uyaziqhenya ngomsebenzi kaDziobak eMiddle East.

“Kwangihlaba umxhwele indlela ahlekisa ngayo. Kuyabonakala kalula, ”kusho isisebenzi sakwa-Dziobak sangaphambilini ngokuhlangana kwe-Raasted. "Ungumuntu onobuntu, futhi uyahlanya."

Namuhla, amaSwistak namanye amalungu ePoland aseDziobak bayazibuza ukuthi ngabe uRaasted wasebenzisa ithuba labo yini lapho ebumba inkampani. Books Schwartz, a former Dziobak employee, said that the Poles didn’t know Raasted’s reputation the way that the other Danes already did. “By the time he started the company, he had already alienated a lot of the serious people who were organizing larps in the Danish scene,” said Schwartz. “There were a lot of Danish larp organizers who would not work with him or collaborate with him, but the Polish larp organizers did not know that.”

When asked about this, Raasted was quick to agree that some Danish larp organizers did not like him. He said these feelings were “because of the way I ran my nonprofit, because of the way I ran my business, because of the way I run my life in general. Some people think I am a sarcastic son of a bitch.”

One of the reasons why Danish larp organizers might have preferred not to work with Raasted was a presentation he delivered at the 2013 Knutpunkt conference. Raasted was a frequent speaker at the Hour of the Rant, a beloved part of Knutpunkt that functions like a comedy roast for the larp world. In his portion of the panel that year, Raasted implored larpers to stop objectifying Danish men. It was a satirical routine in which he invited several Danish larpers on stage to eat apples, signifying that they were “forbidden fruit.” But some who were present were shocked when he began to show pictures of real women who, he said, had had sexual relationships with male Danish larpers.

Raasted confirmed that he had given the presentation, and that he had meant it to be funny. Not everyone saw the humor. “I made a public apology at the end of the event, which was well received by many, but that doesn’t mean (the presentation) didn’t cause harm. It did,” he said.

Raasted describes himself as an “active feminist.” Others say he frequently crossed boundaries and allowed a culture of sexual harassment and assault to take shape at Dziobak events. “He never seems sketchy or anything,” said one former contractor. “It didn’t seem like he was somebody that you shouldn’t trust. …You don’t really know what he’s like until later. Then you’re like, ‘Oh, okay, this is all a front.’”

Raasted was quick to acknowledge that he did hook up with people at larps. “I spent almost 10 years in an open marriage,” he said, “and we both hooked up with people at parties in our various scenes. My scene was the larp scene.” Despite being the head of a prominent business using social events for that business scene to find new dating partners, Raasted said he doesn’t see this as a problem. Once Raasted became the head of Dziobak, he developed a reputation for hooking up with young women, both inside and outside Dziobak events.

Raasted does not deny any of these incidents, or find them problematic. “I’ve met many amazing women that I’ve then had a fling with,” he said of the people he encountered through the larping social scene. But others, both Dziobak workers and larpers who attended Dziobak events, found it questionable that the head of one of the most prominent larping companies consistently hooked up with customers. “I know that he hooked up with girls at College of Wizardry after-parties,” said one Dziobak worker. “I saw him do that many times.” That person felt conflicted, and wasn’t sure if Raasted’s behavior was a problem.

Some workers interviewed for this story drew attention to the ages of the women he pursued. At one point, a member of a Swedish men’s larping Facebook group wrote in a post that Raasted had kissed a 17-year-old and hooked up with a 19-year-old at a party that was part of the larping scene, but not hosted by Dziobak. Raasted confirmed the accounts, but did not apologize for his actions, in an internal memo he sent to Dziobak staff in September 2017. “(I) was (for reasons that are neither here nor there) very drunk and danced a lot more than I normally do,” wrote Raasted. Of his encounter with the 19-year-old woman, he wrote: “We were (it seems) pretty outrageously making out at the party, and some people were not happy about that. Some because they felt there was too big of an age difference. Some because they just felt we should get a room. This is at least what I have been told, since I will openly admit that this part of the evening was hazy.”

When asked whether he paid attention to potential differences in power between him and the women he hooked up with during his time as Dziobak’s CEO, Raasted responded that he “was very aware of the power dynamics at play, and did my very best to be respectful of those.”

Although Raasted said he didn’t mean to make waves, he also didn’t seem to understand the pushback when he blurred the lines between his work life and his social life. As Dziobak grew larger and more influential, and as other companies began using the College of Wizardry model for their own wizard larps, Raasted’s ethically dubious behavior would draw more and more attention.

In 2014, Maury Brown went to the first run of College of Wizardry, and it changed her life. Years prior, as an English major at the University of Virginia, she thought she’d be a natural fit for groups like the Society of Creative Anachronism, a medieval reenactment group that hosted tourneys and armored combat. These groups dangled the possibility that Brown could try on identities other than that of a college freshman living in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

What Brown found instead were groups obsessed with number checks and labyrinthine rules, like a live-action version of Dungeons & Dragons. Even more disappointing, most of the participants were men who were unwilling to see past Brown’s gender. “I chafed at the roles that were available to women,” Brown said.. “It was very much, ‘women do this, women do that, women are ‘m’lady.’” Brown had no interest in being called “m’lady.” All she wanted to do was make armor, learn how to fight, and tell stories together.

When Brown graduated college, she left her early forays into larping behind. She took corporate jobs, then got a masters in education and taught English, but she never quite shook the allure of larping as a way to spin collaborative tales.

In 2013, Brown started a PhD program in new media. “I was interested in looking at roleplay, and how larping, which is embodied roleplay, could change norms and behavior—and through that, change the world,” she said. As she researched, Brown realized that a larping revolution had quietly been taking place across the Atlantic for the last two decades.

Nordic larp, which began in the Scandinavian countries but now refers to a specific style of roleplaying, is all about “collaboration and collective creation (and) unobtrusive rules,” according to Nordiclarp.org. The games are often serious, experimental explorations of cultural hopes and anxieties. For example, Monitor Celestra, a Battlestar Galactica larp run in Sweden, dealt with the annihilation of most of humankind and the survivors’ struggle to find peace in the aftermath.

Brown realized that Nordic larp was the roleplay genre she’d been searching for her whole life. She attended the 2014 Knutpunkt conference and met Claus Raasted, who was gearing up to launch the first College of Wizardry. Brown knew she’d kick herself if she didn’t go, so she bought a ticket to one of the first runs.

In November of 2014, Brown arrived in Poland. She was expecting an effortlessly thrilling experience, like Harry Potter taking the train to Hogwarts for the first time. But her trip from the airport to Czocha Castle was closer to Harry and Ron flying the Weasleys’ car into the Whomping Willow. “There was a bus that some people took, but that had already left by the time my plane arrived,” she said. “I traveled from downtown Wroclaw out to rural Poland, trying to get through with my college German.”

The bus that Brown was on arrived in the town of Lesna at 8:45 p.m., after the larp had already started. After she got off at the Lesna bus stop, she waited for about 20 minutes, wondering if she’d made a massive mistake. She’d never even been to Poland before, and now here she was alone, in a rural town where she knew no one.

Then she heard the screech of tires. “This Volvo came screaming down the street and spun out, and the side door popped open. And I looked in, and there’s three dudes that I don’t know. And I was like ‘College of Wizardry?’ And they’re like, ‘Yes, get in.’ And I was like, ‘I’m either gonna die, or I’m gonna go to wizard school.’”

The Volvo lurched up the hill. Czocha Castle, silhouetted in the dark by the light streaming from its windows, appeared on the horizon. Maury Brown’s first weekend as a student of witchcraft and wizardry was about to begin.

Because she was late, there was only one robe left, and it didn’t fit Brown’s tiny frame. Embracing the spirit of larp, Brown rolled with it. She belted the robe so that it didn’t trip her, met up with her new classmates in House Durentius—called “Roosters” after their house mascot animal—and changed her backstory on the fly: Her character had enemies who had waylaid her on the way to school, stealing all her things. As with all the best improvised stories, the other Roosters took her tale and built on it. Now the robe wasn’t just a spare, it was a loaner from the Durentius prefect, a hulking Danish man. “Durentius was a lovely group of people,” said Brown. “We became family.”

The rest of the weekend was just as magical. Because the larpers felt secure to be as creative as they wanted, storylines between Brown and other characters developed organically. “I just went with so many things,” said Brown. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna go out into the forest.’ And there was a leprechaun! And the leprechaun was selling me something on the black market.”

By the end of the weekend, Brown knew she had been right: College of Wizardry was the larp for her. “I was like, ‘Look at these people. Look at how they uplift each other,” she said. “Look at how they don’t need to yell numbers at each other.”

But the larp wasn’t perfect. There was an element of chaos to the weekend, not just because it was one of the first runs of College of Wizardry, but because there weren’t enough safety precautions. According to Brown, she witnessed players get into scenes that caused real tears, or bruises, or both. “There weren’t enough boundaries,” she said.

Larping is unique among games in that players can get both physically and emotionally hurt. Like a sport, players use their bodies to play the game. A chase scene that isn’t properly negotiated might end with a larper falling down a flight of stairs and twisting an ankle. According to Agata Swistak, sprained wrists and ankles were some of the most common physical problems, along with hangovers, food poisoning, and travel-related exhaustion. “People coming to College of Wizardry often cut sleep and forget about water and food because they are so amazed and distracted by the experience,” she said.

Then there’s the emotional transference of embodying another person. As with method acting, players must mentally shoulder a character’s ambitions, desires, and anxieties. Consider a scene in which two characters have an intense conversation. Maybe they’re in love, maybe they hate each other. The players also have to feel some of that love or hate. And since it’s impossible to completely divorce fantasy characters from personal memories, as well as real-world politics like race, gender, and class, those scenes can be difficult.

Without proper preparation and guidelines, scenes can have lasting consequences for the players. When emotions from larps cross over into players’ day-to-day lives, it’s called “bleed.” Lines between fantasy and reality blur, like ink spreading on damp fabric. Bleed isn’t always negative, but when it is, it can have destructive emotional consequences for larpers.

Swistak said that there were often moments when participants felt “sad, lonely, angry or hurt … and needed to cry it out.” (She made sure that at least one Dziobak staff member was always on call as emotional support for players who needed to talk out what they’d just experienced.)

Maury Brown returned from Poland inspired to bring the Nordic larp ethos to the United States, perhaps with some improvements. “I came back going, ‘Freedom! Great. Still need boundaries,’” she said. Brown was convinced that College of Wizardry could be the jumping-off point for more larps of its kind that were both safer and more accessible for larpers in the United States. In November 2015, Brown and her romantic partner, Ben Morrow, another larp enthusiast, founded Learn Larp, LLC. They launched a Kickstarter campaign for New World Magischola, a larp set in the same fictional universe as College of Wizardry. (The Polish larp was now more generic in its theming, following a cease-and-desist letter from Warner Bros.)

Brown and Morrow decided to ask for $35,000 to put on a larp at the University of Richmond in Virginia. The university’s Gothic Revival architecture meant the location was as close to Czocha Castle as the United States could manage. Raasted and Charles Bo Nielsen, another of the College of Wizardry designers, would serve as on-site advisers. New World Magischola and Czocha College would be “sister schools” in the same fictional universe. Brown knew that the United States had a massive market of Harry Potter superfans, but she wasn’t sure if they’d Kickstart a larp. She didn’t have to worry. Within an hour of launch, the campaign had earned $150,000. By the time it was over, Brown and Morrow had raised over $300,000, over eight times what they’d initially sought. New World Magischola went on to run for four weekends in June and July of 2016.

It was an exciting time for Nordic-style larps around the world. With both College of Wizardry and New World Magischola raking in money and publicity, the possibilities for wizard school-inspired larps seemed endless. “They have this very broad appeal, not just to larpers, but to people who are into the idea of wizard school,” said Sharang Biswas, a New York City-based game designer and interactive artist. “These larps were attracting a lot of people who had never larped before, but they also attracted people whose primary larp outlet was foam weapons-style larping in the woods.”

But the explosive popularity of these larps meant frequent bumps in the road of the design process, and frustration for both the Learn Larp and Dziobak employees who made the games.

In 2017, Agata Swistak was promoted to project manager for College of Wizardry, and relocated from Katowice, Poland to Copenhagen, Denmark to work from the main Dziobak office. Swistak was excited to leave: Poland has some of the most restrictive reproductive health laws in Europe, so she was ready to move somewhere that, she hoped, would be more egalitarian. Plus, her then-partner lived in Copenhagen.

The move was difficult. “I was in a new country and doing work in a new way,” she said. “Also, I was extremely underpaid.” Swistak received a bump in her salary when she moved, so she was now making 7,000 Danish kroner (about $1000) each month. However, there was a large difference in the cost of living between Katowice and Copenhagen. The average salary in Copenhagen is 21,150 kroner (about $3100) a month. Claus Raasted told Swistak that he knew plenty of students who lived on the same amount that he was paying her, so she tried her best to make her finances work out.

She couldn’t do it. “I ran out of money, and I had to borrow money from Claus to pay my rent,” she said. Swistak insisted that she needed a raise, not just to survive in Copenhagen but to compensate her for the grueling hours she worked during event seasons. Now that Dziobak was juggling three headliner destination larps, plus whatever contract work that Raasted and his Romanian business partner Paul Bulencea could drum up, Dziobak workers never stopped moving. “When we were traveling and at events, we were working up to 100 hours a week,” Swistak said. She and the rest of the Polish team spent up to 150 days each year preparing, running, and breaking down larps in the three castles they rented.

When Swistak moved to Denmark, she received an official employment agreement. It was the first time she’d had one. However, something about it bothered her. “My job agreement said that I work 25 hours a week,” she said. “Because if that salary was placed next to 37 hours, which is the norm in Denmark, somebody in the government would pay attention to it and check why I’m getting so little.”

Swistak felt increasingly like Raasted was taking advantage of the entire staff. “We would make more if we went to 7-Eleven and worked as cashiers,” she said. “We would make more if we were cleaners in hotels.” Denmark doesn’t have minimum wage laws, but the lower end of the salary bell curve is about 16 euros an hour. Swistak was making eight.

Raasted said that, since there was no minimum wage, Dziobak didn’t break the law with Swistak’s employment agreement. Still, he admitted that Dziobak didn’t pay workers what they deserved. “Workload and compensation were a major issue,” he said. He wished he could have paid workers more, but, he said, running an international company was more difficult than he was prepared for. Raasted also compared Dziobak’s low-pay, high-workload model to that of a typical tech startup. “It’s not exactly a secret that at startups, there’s sometimes little overlap between what the formal papers say (working hours, for example) and what reality is,” he said. “On the other hand, except for when they were on events, people could work when they wanted, there was no oversight on time spent, and there was a pretty insane level of personal freedom.”

Swistak did not feel that she had much freedom from work at all. After a year in Copenhagen, her body could no longer handle the stress, and she was admitted to the hospital for overwork. When she came home, she demanded that Raasted raise her salary and pay for her therapy, and he agreed on both counts. He bumped her pay considerably and paid for teletherapy with a therapist who was a native Polish speaker.

“I think it’s cool that he took responsibility for this and decided to pay for my therapy,” Swistak said. “But I also think that he should have paid me enough that I could afford it myself, you know?”

Being in therapy helped Swistak realize that Dziobak was the quintessential toxic workplace. Yes, she was creating larps for a living, just as she’d sworn she would when she was 16. But the drain on her health wasn’t worth it. With the help of her therapist and Polish coworkers, Swistak decided she would quit by the end of 2018. Until then, she would keep her head down and try to prevent Dziobak from going off the rails.

Despite her best efforts, 2018 was a disaster.

When Books Schwartz was hired by Dziobak at the beginning of 2018, it wasn’t their first time working for a destination larp. They’d just finished a year-long stint on staff at Maury Brown’s New World Magischola, and Schwartz and Brown had not ended their business relationship on good terms. Schwartz hoped that Dziobak would be an opportunity to start over.

Like Brown and Swistak, Schwartz had discovered larping in their teens. A friend persuaded them to come to Wayfinder, a summer camp in upstate New York that mixed outdoor adventures with larping. Schwartz, a huge fantasy fan, found the experience freeing. “We were experimenting with being a hero, being a villain, trying on different identities,” Schwartz said. “At the time, I was just in the process of figuring out my identity as a non-binary person, and I could try out different genders.”

As they got older and went to college, they never stopped larping. Schwartz spent their summers managing larps for kids and teens, first at Wayfinder and then as the head of larping at Trackers Bay, a wilderness survival/larping camp. Still, they wanted more.

In 2016, they went to the Living Games Conference, an American larping conference similar to Knutpunkt held in Austin, Texas. There, they met Maury Brown and Claus Raasted, who were both keynote speakers. Schwartz already knew who both of them were. Raasted styled himself as the brains behind the massively successful College of Wizardry, and Schwartz already had a ticket to the very first run of Brown’s New World Magischola which would be held just a few months later.

Speaking with Raasted at the conference, Schwartz asked him for advice on how to run larps. “Claus basically said, ‘If you want to really know how to run one of these, you have to come to the castle. You cannot be told, you must experience it. You should come be an NPC. Here’s the person to email. I will tell her you are coming.’ And I went, ‘Okay!’”

Schwartz sent a message to the email address Raasted had given them, which was Agata Swistak’s. She wrote back, confused. Her NPC list for the upcoming run of College of Wizardry in November was already full, something she’d told Raasted. But, she said, she could put Schwartz on the waiting list. Would that do?

It would, Schwartz assured her. In the meantime, they flew to Richmond, Virginia for the first run of New World Magischola, which left them “blown away.”

“It was intense and emotional,” Schwartz said. The character they played, Blair, was an anti-werewolf bigot who loudly protested against werewolves getting rights in wizarding society. During the larp, a character played by one of Schwartz’s friends was outed as a werewolf. As Blair, Schwartz kidnapped the other student in a misguided effort to cure them of lycanthropy.

The plot arc peaked during a dramatic scene in which Schwartz, who had dragged the other student to a picturesque gazebo in the middle of University of Richmond’s Westhampton Lake, force-fed the werewolf a home-brewed “cure.” Other NWM students rushed to the werewolf’s rescue, shoved Schwartz aside, and performed an hour-long healing ritual while the werewolf writhed and screamed in pain.

The scene was powerful and suspenseful, but it was also safe. Schwartz, an experienced larper, had taken time to talk to their fellow participant about what would happen. “They said, out of character, ‘How do we wanna play this? Do you wanna just kidnap me?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, totally. How about on that island over there around 4:15? Once people are getting out of classes?’ ‘Cool, what if our other friend who’s playing a prophet has a vision of you kidnapping me so that he can announce it to a bunch of people?’ ‘Yes! Do we wanna talk about how the scene ends?” “No, no, let’s leave that up to the other players,’” Schwartz said, recounting the conversation. “That allowed us to calibrate.”

Schwartz appreciated the emphasis that New World Magischola put on safety. After the larp was over, they were excited to learn that they’d gotten off the waitlist to be an NPC at Czocha Castle, at a run that Brown and Morrow would be attending as players.

Schwartz loved College of Wizardry, and they loved serving as an NPC, having to improvise different roles requested by players on the fly. “The most common request is their character’s dad who does not like them, and they want to stand up to their bad dad. Just bad dads all the way down,” Schwartz said. “It’s because there are a bunch of twentysomething queers with parental issues that they haven’t worked out in therapy yet.”

Schwartz handled some NPC requests for Brown and Morrow, who were impressed with their work. Schwartz began volunteering on Learn Larp projects, which eventually turned into a paid freelance gig: developing Magischola Prep, a summer camp version of New World Magischola for kids. Since Schwartz had a background as a larping camp designer, they were well-suited to the job. They signed a contract stipulating they would develop a structure for the camp in exchange for a payment of $1,500.

As Schwarz worked to translate a weekend experience for adults into a week-long summer camp for teens and tweens, they realized that Learn Larp’s vision of a 300-kid larp was overly ambitious, and convinced Brown and Morrow that a group of 30 would be more reasonable. Meanwhile, they began to notice that the main design team was understaffed and overstressed. According to Schwartz, they video-chatted Brown and offered to extend their freelance agreement for $7,500 more. Brown agreed, and assigned them work for both Magischola Prep and New World Magischola.

That summer was the craziest of their life. “I worked very, very hard the summer of 2017,” they said. Schwartz said they ended up working every run of New World Magischola in addition to Magischola Prep. “All of us were working from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m. pretty much every day. It was exhausting.”

When the summer ended, Brown didn’t pay Schwartz the extra money they’d discussed over video chat. When Schwartz asked about it, Brown said they had designed a summer program for 30 kids, not the 300 she had wanted. Schwartz replied that they’d worked every session of New World Magischola, too. Brown’s response: Schwartz had not completed all of the work they’d informally promised to do over video chat, and Brown had to hire someone else to fill in the gaps.The two went back and forth for months as they tried to decide the value of Schwartz’s work. Eventually, Learn Larp paid out most of the $7,500.

Brown maintains that Schwartz did not complete the work that she’d expected of them. Schwartz, on the other hand, still believes that Brown’s expectations were unfair. They said underpayment is a huge issue in the larping industry, and Learn Larp was no exception. “Even if the full amount of the contract had been paid, I don’t think it would have been fair compensation,” Schwartz said. The sheer amount of work that we were doing, the intensity of it, the exhaustion and the emotional labor of it… If you actually converted it to an hourly wage, it would have been absurdly well below minimum wage.”

After that summer working for Learn Larp, Schwartz began eyeing Dziobak for a job. They knew Dziobak had flaws, but they didn’t know that Dziobak staff members like Agata Swistak were also growing despondent over pay rates. And not only that, they were also becoming increasingly worried about the increasing number of PR gaffes and scandals in which Dziobak constantly found itself mired.

Ever since the first College of Wizardry, Claus Raasted had his sights set on corporate and government clients. Businesses who saw College of Wizardry’s success and figured out that larps could be monetized needed people to design larps for them. Tourism officials realized that destination larps brought an influx of visitors and cash to remote sites. According to several ex-Dziobak employees, Raasted’s plan was to court these clients as a way to make Dziobak financially solvent.

The first time this plan raised eyebrows was when Raasted made a deal with Yas Waterworld, a water park in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. In 2016, Raasted met Paul Bulencea, a Romanian experience designer and author of a book titled Gamification in Tourism. Bulencea had never heard of larping before he met Raasted, he said. When he heard about College of Wizardry, he was blown away: “This is how I imagined the future of tourism,” he said over email.

For the next three years, Bulencea would bring pitches for international projects to Raasted, and the two would turn the pitches into larps using Dziobak’s people and resources. “I was giving him suggestions based on my conceptual vision,” said Bulencea, noting that it was Raasted who “led” all the projects.

When Bulencea met Raasted, the Romanian designer had been working on a pitch for a tourism project at Yas Waterworld. Together, they developed a larp they called “Legends of Arabia: Quest of the Pearl Tribes.” The larp, which took place in December 2016 on the grounds of the park, was meant to keep tourists’ attention after the rides had closed.

When Dziobak team members found out about the project, some of them were upset. The UAE has a long history of human rights abuses, such as labor rights abuse and ‘disappearing’ political dissidents. However, it’s also one of the wealthiest, most tourist-friendly countries on the Arabian peninsula. Several contractors ultimately agreed to go to Abu Dhabi for a month to design and run Legends of Arabia.

From the outside, the project looked questionable at best and like cultural appropriation at worst. Promo photos showed Raasted and Bulencea wearing traditional Emirati clothing. Only one person of Arab descent worked on the team.

According to Raasted, it wasn’t supposed to be like that. Other Arabs were slated to contribute, he said, but were turned away at the border because of their nationalities. The sole Arab contractor who made it was only allowed through because of their Jordanian passport. As a result, the team wasn’t as diverse as Raasted had expected, and some non-Arab members were uncomfortable. “It was a little bit like Arabian Nights,” said one person who worked on the project, referring to the famous collection of Middle Eastern folk tales, early translations of which often exoticized the Middle East.

Two sources who were on site for the larp did say that an Emirati team oversaw the design, provided a basic storyline and costume guidance, and signed off on the larp content before any water park guests participated. “I was like, ‘I don’t know about this,’” said one person who worked on the project. “But at the same time, this is the look that (Yas Waterworld) wanted.”

The person said they were ultimately conflicted about working on Legends of Arabia. The UAE relies heavily on migrant laborers from South Asia and North Africa, and the Dziobak contractor said they witnessed laborers subjected to racism and labor abuse. They knew that their passport from a Westernized nation kept them from receiving the same treatment. “They build beautiful cities, but it’s a brutal, brutal culture in some ways,” said the contractor.

After the month-long project concluded, the Dziobak staffers who had been against the Yas Waterworld project breathed a collective sigh of relief. At least that was over.

Then Raasted went to Saudi Arabia.

“Saudi Arabia is a terrible place. It’s an absolute monarchy, a rigid class society and it scores low on human rights indexes everywhere,” wrote Raasted in a memo to all Dziobak employees and contractors in November 2017. “Why are we going, then? Because there is a slight chance to make a real difference here.”

Saudi Arabia was in the midst of planning its Saudi Vision 2030, a complex set of initiatives meant to diversify the country’s economy. The consulting company McKinsey was managing the Vision 2030 project, and one of the areas they’d pinpointed for tourism development was Al-’Ula, a desert valley that housed the 2,000-year-old ruins of a walled city. One of the ideas McKinsey had was to create a destination larp in Al-’Ula. They had invited Paul Bulencea to pitch a larp concept to Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s tourism board. Would Raasted be interested in joining the pitch process, McKinsey wanted to know?

He was. At the end of November, Raasted flew to Saudi Arabia, where he scouted Al-’Ula along with Bulencea and then pitched the tourism board on a Library of Alexandria larp. In exchange, Bulencea and Raasted received 25,000 euros ($27,843). Despite having written in an internal memo that “(the trip is) going to make some money that we badly need,” Raasted told Kotaku that Dziobak did not get any money from the trip.

Once again, some Dziobak workers were upset. The UAE had a bad track record with human rights, but Saudi Arabia was worse. Raasted said that Dziobak split down an ideological line. “One group said, we need to go to the dark places to light the torches. Another said, we should stay away from the dark places because eventually they’ll get better. We should boycott them until they learn how to light torches of their own.” Raasted believed that larping was a way of lighting those torches. Others didn’t. One worker, who said they didn’t trust Raasted to properly ensure the safety of any team members he brought along, slowly began cutting ties with Dziobak.

Raasted didn’t seem to understand why some Dziobak members didn’t approve of the Saudi Arabia trip. “Claus kept asking, ‘Why aren’t we excited?’,” said another worker. “I was like, ‘This is morally ambiguous. That’s one thing. Another thing is whenever there will be a project, I am not going to go there, because I am a woman.’” She would feel unsafe, she said, and she didn’t know whether she’d be able to take on a leadership role because of attitudes towards women. (The country’s “guardianship” system, which forbade women from traveling or applying for passports without the permission of a male relative, is only now being dismantled.)

Ultimately, the larp never happened, and the Saudi tourism board now has plans to construct a resort near Al-’Ula instead. Raasted doesn’t regret the trips to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. “Some of the work that I’m most proud of today is working on culture change in Saudi Arabia,” he said.

In the meantime, Raasted was still under frequent scrutiny for his attitude towards women. At the end of 2017, a larper who had attended Dziobak events accused a Dziobak contractor of sexually abusing her. She didn’t name the contractor, but a Dziobak writer named Jamie Snetsinger subsequently published an 18-page open letter denying all the claims. His letter included over 130 screenshots of text and messenger conversations, many of which revealed unrelated, private information about the customer’s personal life.

Many members of the larp community saw Snetsinger’s letter as an intimidation attempt. “I was definitely worried that he was writing characters for vulnerable young women,” said larper Cheyenne Rain. Snetsinger resigned from Dziobak. When Raasted posted that news to Dziobak’s Facebook page, he included a link to Snetsinger’s open letter.

Raasted faced immediate backlash. In linking to the letter, he had made the accuser’s identity public to anyone who followed Dziobak on Facebook. Raasted deleted the post and put up a new one, this time without the link, but the damage had already been done. Larpers like Rain were angry at Raasted for failing to think through the implications of sharing Snetsinger’s letter. Though Raasted wrote a public apology letter, a freelancer who had done narrative design work with Snetsinger, Nicole Winchester, resigned over Raasted’s handling of the situation. She was also bothered by what she saw as abuse of Polish workers, as well as Raasted and Bulencea’s trip to Saudi Arabia.

“It was not to my benefit to resign,” said Winchester, who said that she had no other job prospects at the time. But morally, she felt like she had no choice.

Raasted himself continued behaving in ways that some described as sexual harassment. One worker described an alarming scenario that unfolded while she, Raasted, and others were staying in a hotel for a contract job. The worker said she was being harassed on social media by someone connected to the organization Dziobak was partnering with, and she wasn’t sure what to do.

She asked Raasted if they could meet up to talk about it, and Raasted invited her up to his hotel room to chat. “So I come by his room, and he’s literally in his underwear,” said the worker . She laughed it off, even though she felt strange about it. “We work it out. I leave. And then I think about it later. And I’m like, ‘Fuck, your employee’s coming to tell you that they’ve been harassed.’ And your response is, ‘I’m just going to greet them at the door in my underwear’?”

Later, when she described the incident to her husband, he said it reminded him of Harvey Weinstein’s behavior. “And I was like, ‘Oh, my god, it is. It’s a Harvey Weinstein story,’” she recalled.

Raasted said that he doesn’t remember an incident matching this description, but that he “wouldn’t be at all surprised if that had happened.” He added, without being asked, that he sometimes held meetings in a pool, while everyone was wearing swimwear, during Convention of Thorns. But he doesn’t believe any of his behavior would be classified as sexual harassment. “If someone tries to imply that this was about gender rather than just about being relaxed dress code wise, I’d disagree vehemently,” he said.

Raasted has his defenders, like Paul Bulencea, who told Kotaku that he had never seen Raasted behaving “in an unethical or disrespectful way” toward women. But other Dziobak staff members believe that not only did Raasted routinely disregard the power dynamics inherent in a relationship between a male CEO and female workers, but that he was a threat to women who attended Dziobak larps. Over the years, various Dziobak staff members had added any player who violated the company’s code of conduct to a list of people who were refused entry. In 2018, that list was passed on to a new team appointed to handle both customer and volunteer safety. By the summer of 2018, Claus Raasted was on the list, too, something he didn’t know until asked to comment for this story. (“I was not aware that there were Dziobak staffers put me on such a list in 2018, no,” he said via email.)

Raasted had lost the trust of some Dziobak workers, and his name on the list made clear how hard it would be to repair those relationships. As the company hurtled towards a financial precipice, that job wouldn’t get any easier.

Back in 2017, as the year was about to end, Agata Swistak persuaded Raasted to offer Books Schwartz a job as a member of the so-called Swistak Commando Unit, which managed both College of Wizardry design and volunteer operations. Schwartz eagerly accepted, though they knew the job meant working with Claus Raasted, whom they’d already come to distrust.

In the spring of 2017, Schwartz had volunteered as an NPC at College of Wizardry: The Challenge, a Triwizard Tournament-style event that brought together Czocha College of Wizardry, New World Magischola, and Nibelungen, the German branch of College of Wizardry. Raasted released a design document late and with few concrete details about the larp structure, angering players who had already bought tickets and forcing Schwartz to take on a large chunk of design work they hadn’t expected.

Schwartz wasn’t eager to work with Raasted again, and they didn’t like the annual salary of $20,000 that Raasted offered, but they took the job anyway. “It was a life dream. It was a dream job,” said Schwartz. “I got paid to go run larps and live in a castle in Poland, and I had the best coworkers in the world. We had the best player community in the world. We had an actual 13th-century castle with a dozen secret passages in it. It was a magical fairy tale dream come true.”

Every ex-Dziobak team member interviewed for this article repeated that idea. They had been handed a job so full of creative freedom, so imbued with magic, that it seemed too good to exist. And didn’t doing what they loved require sacrifice? Wasn’t a design job like this worth the struggle of accepting a low salary? Because of these beliefs, they tolerated as much as they could before they buckled under the stress and poor wages, a common theme in every sector of the games industry.

During the first half of 2018, Schwartz lived with one foot in the United States and the other in Poland. When they were running College of Wizardry, they stayed in Czocha Castle. When there were no events to run, they had no choice but to go home to the U.S. After all, they couldn’t afford an apartment in Poland or Denmark in addition to an apartment in the U.S.

If Dziobak had an HR department, Schwartz might have been able to ask for help through official channels. In early 2018, it seemed like the company might get big enough for that to become a reality. Raasted had plans to merge Dziobak with Imagine Nation, an American larping studio known for running events like the zombie apocalypse larp Dystopia Rising. Dystopia Rising, LLC, Imagine Nation’s sibling company, is run like a franchise. It has chapters all over the United States. “It’s the exact same as Subway,” said Ashley Zdeb, CEO of Imagine Nation and former CEO of Dystopia Rising, LLC. “I have, currently, 19 branches.” If the two companies had merged, the resulting entity would have been the largest larp studio in the world.

But Imagine Nation and Dziobak didn’t merge. Once Zdeb started poring through Dziobak’s financial records, she realized that the company was headed toward disaster. “We knew they had debt,” she said. “We had no idea quite how much and how bad it was.” After several months, Zdeb still had no idea how much money was being spent per Dziobak larp. Every time she spoke to someone at Dziobak, she discovered some new debt.

Raasted said that this was because he was constantly taking out new loans in order to keep Dziobak afloat. “To say that Dziobak had cash flow issues would be an understatement,” he said. “Salaries were delayed, one very patient employee wasn’t paid for half a year, and things were a chaotic mess.”

None of this comforted Zdeb. Another thing that bothered her was the work agreements that Dziobak employees and contractors had signed, which were so vague that she could barely understand what they meant. “It might be fine in Denmark, but my American brain was like, ‘Oh, that’s a half-page that maybe talks about the fact that they’ll do work,’” said Zdeb.

Raasted and Zdeb mutually called off the merger in the summer of 2018. Zdeb didn’t hold any hard feelings against Dziobak or Raasted, whom she still considers a friend today. Just different business styles, she figured. Still, she wanted to save herself and Imagine Nation team members the anxiety of sorting through Dziobak’s financial quagmire.

“Everything was always an emergency right now,” she said. “Everything always had a sense of panic to it. And that’s stressful, you know?”

Before the merger failed, most of the Dziobak staff had a vague sense that the company wasn’t doing well. Sometimes they wouldn’t get paid on time. Sometimes larp budgets didn’t get approved until the last moment, or invoices from the castles were ignored. But around the time Imagine Nation backed out, Raasted posted a financial spreadsheet that included salary information for every employee and freelancer in the company Slack. “Financial information had been available before to people who wanted to see it,” Raasted said of his decision to publicly reveal this information. “But I wanted to force people to learn the facts so they could have intelligent dialogue. And that failed.”

Looking at the spreadsheet, the Polish workers had several realizations that made them queasy. First, Dziobak was teetering on the brink of financial ruin. Income from ticket sales was not being set aside to pay for future larps, but was instead being used to pay off invoices from larps that had happened over a year ago—”eating the future to pay for the past,” as Raasted would later put it. Second, the Danish workers were being paid far more than the Polish workers. The difference was starker considering the two countries’ healthcare systems: while both countries technically have universal healthcare systems, Denmark’s is much stronger. Polish citizens, on the other hand, often end up relying on private health insurance, a cost Dziobak wasn’t paying for. Third, because the Imagine Nation merger wasn’t going to happen, the international and Polish teams wouldn’t have the chance to appeal to an HR department. “That was the moment when I lost faith in the company,” said one of the Polish workers.

Raasted confirmed to Kotaku that the Danish team had been making more than the Polish team, but said that he believed the rates were fair. “The Polish team was paid quite a bit less than the Danish, but relative to national income, they were paid quite a lot more,” he said.

Raasted tried to quell the unrest, but it had reached a fever pitch. The Polish staff members had been working days that sometimes lasted as long as 14 hours. During the failed merger, few people knew who they reported to, or who was in charge of which department. One person had recently seen a doctor, who told them that their arduous work hours were having a terrible effect on their physical health, similar to what happened to Agata Swistak in 2017. Something had to give.

Several members of the Polish team spent days writing out a plan that overhauled Dziobak’s finances. The plan was based on the operating budget for a standard larp, as well as information from the salary spreadsheet. The overhaul included some drastic measures, such as downgrading some full-time employees to freelancers and letting other freelancers go. At the beginning of 2018, Dziobak had about 40 employees and contractors. Some of them worked for the “Thunder Group,” an informal name for the collective of Dziobak Larp Studios, Rollespilsfabrikken, and Rollespilsakademiet. Some of them worked for both Imagine Nation and the Thunder Group. After the Imagine Nation merger fell through and the Thunder Group separated back into distinct teams, Dziobak’s numbers were cut in half, to about 20 employees and contractors.

The Polish team wasn’t even sure what all the remaining people did. “We were like, ‘Why are they here? Why are they earning twice as much as we do?’” said one worker. The Polish team didn’t like the idea of cutting anyone, but if the company was to survive, they believed that a complete restructuring was necessary.

Around the beginning of August, the ad hoc financial planning committee asked Raasted for a meeting so that they could go over their plan with him. The meeting did not go well. Raasted allegedly alternated between accusing the team of ganging up on him and threatening to let everyone go. “What Claus took from this conversation was, ‘Fire everybody,’” said a person who was present.

Raasted maintains that the committee “proposed the plan based on emotions” and threatened to quit on the spot if their demands were not met. “I tried to explain that even if we fired everybody, including themselves… that would only solve one third of the problem. We were too heavy in debt to be able to save our way out of the problem,” he said. In Raasted’s opinion, the committee’s actions sealed Dziobak’s fate. “I have the debt. They can feel that they were the real victims,” he said.

Raasted began calling the committee “the Polish rebellion” and “Polish war dogs,” which made the Polish team feel like Raasted valued their work even less. Anti-Polish discrimination, especially in Western European and Scandinavian countries, has been a problem in Europe for centuries. Some of the most common stereotypes suggest that Poles are lazy, stupid, aggressive, and underhanded. The team felt like Raasted was openly playing on those stereotypes.

Raasted confirmed that he used either “the Polish rebellion” or “the Polish war dogs”—he says he doesn’t remember which—but said he meant it affectionately, not offensively. “Most of (the team) I knew incredibly closely, through thick and thin. We’ve done crazy stuff together,” he said. “But that feeling may have happened.”

During the next week, about half the remaining Dziobak workers were laid off, none of them from the Polish team. One Polish worker only narrowly avoided being laid off: Raasted allegedly planned to cut their job, too, but other Polish workers persuaded Raasted that the staff member was essential. “If not for those two coworkers, I would be fired,” said the worker. By the time the layoffs were done, Dziobak only had about 10 full-time team members left. The Polish team was aghast. They’d wanted a reduction, yes, but not at this scale.

At least one employee was still devoted to Dziobak, no matter the cost: Philipp Jacobius, a producer who had joined the company in 2016. After attending a College of Wizardry run, he turned down a well-paying job at Expedia for the chance to work at Dziobak. Though he acknowledged the company’s flaws, his passion won out in the end. “Nobody should work for just the money,” he said. “Everyone should work on something that they enjoy doing.”

Not only did Jacobius forgo his salary for six months (with a promise that he’d get paid back eventually), he loaned the company 50,000 euros ($55,765). “I believed in what we did, and unlike some of my former colleagues, I believed in Claus as a leader,” he said. The layoffs drove a rift between Jacobius and his coworkers, one that would only get worse over time.

Meanwhile, in Boston, Books Schwartz was packing up their sublet apartment and preparing to move to Copenhagen. They were excited, since living in Europe meant no more trans-Atlantic flights. Sure, there were wrinkles. They still didn’t like Raasted, and they’d paid $1,000 for a work visa application that Ashley Zdeb, then acting as head of both Dziobak and Imagine Nation, said the companies could not afford to cover.

“Given that Dziobak couldn’t even cover payroll for the majority of its employees, I let Books know that the additional cost (of the visa) wasn’t possible,” said Zdeb. Schwartz said the application got rejected, apparently because the salary Dziobak was offering was too low. (Raasted said he does not recall Schwartz’s visa getting rejected, but that he would have paid the fee if he’d been aware.)

As Schwartz packed, they got word about the layoffs. “I messaged Claus and I was like, ‘Claus, hey, half the company’s just been laid off. I’m moving to Europe in three weeks to work for you. Should I be worried?’” In response, Raasted called them. Schwartz wasn’t going to get fired, Raasted said, even though he said that the Polish team wanted that. Instead, Raasted said he had fought to keep Schwartz. “It was pretty transparent emotional manipulation to get us to trust him and not trust the rest of the team,” said Schwartz. “Which was absurd, because all of us were talking to each other all the time… It was buck-fucking wild.”

Schwartz was stuck. Someone else was scheduled to move into the room they were vacating in Boston, and they already had a place in Copenhagen. “I was like, ‘There’s not a lot else I can do,’” they said. “I will go with the assumption that I will not stay longer than a couple of months, and I will immediately start looking for other work.”

When they arrived in Copenhagen, the Dziobak office was empty. The entire Danish team had been laid off, with the exception of two employees, who were on vacation. Raasted’s other organizations, Rollespilsfabrikken and Rollespilsakademiet, shared the building, so Schwartz set up camp in their offices. Still, Schwartz found the experience “completely demoralizing.” Things would improve when they went to Poland to run the fall larps, Schwartz thought. They had to.

During the first week of October 2018, Dziobak imploded. It was so fast and so strange that staff members look back on that time and wonder if it really happened.

The implosion began in the days leading up to College of Wizardry 13. The staff was calling it “the Cursed CoW.” The larp would actually be the 21st run of College of Wizardry, but as the original 13th run had been canceled the year prior due to low ticket sales, the designers decided to bring back College of Wizardry 13 as a Halloween special, jokingly leaning into the idea of the “Cursed CoW” as a weekend at wizarding university where everything went wrong.

“If only we knew, if only we knew the fire we were playing with!” said Schwartz.

A few days before the larp began, Raasted created a first draft of the company’s 2019 catalogue. He was in Copenhagen and the rest of the Dziobak staff was preparing Czocha Castle for an influx of larpers, so Raasted sent the catalogue mockup over Slack. The staff was aghast at what they saw. Ticket prices for the following year’s events were listed at 1,000 euros each, rather than 400 to 650. What’s more, the document was filled with descriptions of larps that no one had even begun to design, like a werewolf larp, a family-friendly version of College of Wizardry, and a space opera called Endless Void. One event was a Robin Hood-themed larp that cost 3,000 euros. Another was supposed to take place at a location that they knew had outright refused to host any larps. “It was just a bananas catalogue,” said Schwartz.

Raasted wanted each worker’s name and picture in the catalogue, ostensibly to put a human face on the company. But nobody wanted to have their name attached to the document. “Of course it was all done with temporary placeholder pictures and a generic font, because he fired the entire graphic design and marketing team,” said Schwartz. “So he had cobbled this together himself and it looked like garbage.”

“We were like, ‘Well, shit, what do we do? This is clearly the last straw. We cannot have our names on this and let this go out and be sold to participants,” they said. The remaining team members knew that selling as many tickets as possible was the ultimate goal, since Dziobak desperately needed the funds to pay off previous castle invoices. Several times that fall, Czocha Castle staff had nearly kicked Dziobak out mid-larp for failing to pay invoices from the last season.

Speaking to Kotaku, Raasted said that launching so many new larps was something the company had done in previous years, and the 2019 catalogue was not a way to secure quick money. Then Raasted volunteered something truly surprising: He had considered selling tickets to a high-end larp at a premium location, then canceling the larp a few months later and refunding the participants. But the larp would never have been real. Its actual purpose would be to float Dziobak what equated to an interest-free loan. “I couldn’t borrow any more money, but maybe we could get people to sign up and pay 50,000 euros, which we would then give them back,” he said. In the end, Raasted decided that taking money for a nonexistent larp would have been “shady” and chose not to do it.

“It became clear to us that this company could not run forever,” said Agata Swistak, who had survived the layoffs. “At some point, it will fall.” One by one, six of the 10 remaining staff members, including Schwartz and Swistak, messaged Raasted to say the same thing: They would stick around for the rest of the season’s events, but. once the season wrapped in December, they were quitting.Raasted would lose most of his Polish team, including the most experienced members.

Nobody waited around for Raasted’s response, because there was no time. Two hundred 200 people were about to show up to Czocha Castle. Dziobak had a larp to run.

The Cursed CoW went off without a hitch. “We did our best to give the players a great experience,” said Swistak. On Sunday night, Swistak was giving her customary end-of-larp speech. Ever since she became the production head of College of Wizardry, she had delivered a speech from the balcony of Czocha Castle’s great hall, thanking the players for their efforts and reminding them to be respectful at the afterparty. “People were clapping and crying, and we were super happy,” said Swistak.

And then, from the doorway leading to the balcony, a deep, masculine voice boomed, “Greetings!” It was Claus Raasted, and he had his six-month-old baby strapped to his chest. The team had no idea he was coming. Raasted, said Swistak, pushed her out of the way—not hard, but enough to move her aside—unstrapped the baby, and lifted her over the balcony like he was holding up baby Simba from The Lion King.

“He was expecting a massive round of applause and a hero’s welcome from the participants. But most of the participants had no idea who he was, because he almost never actually went to the larps anymore,” said Schwartz, who was sitting, dumbfounded, in the audience below.

“Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck is happening?’” Swistak said. She was dumbfounded too, but she was also angry. “It’s really a feminine moment, when a dude interrupts you speaking in front of 200 people because he thinks he’s going to be funny,” she added.

In the audience below, some people were having panic attacks. They’d all had interactions with Raasted that gave them the impression he emotionally abused his employees. His unexpected appearance was more than they could bear, and they quietly left the great hall.

Using the larpers of the Cursed CoW as a captive audience, Raasted announced that this larp would be the last for several crucial Dziobak staff members. He invited those who were leaving to come up on the balcony for a round of applause. “Mind you, this was in fact the fourth of thirteen back-to-back events,” said Schwartz. “So this was very much not the last time they would see us there unless he was trying to fire us.” As the players looked on with confusion, Schwartz, Swistak, and the others wondered: Was this a test of loyalty? Were they getting publicly fired, effective immediately? Also, why was Raasted still holding his baby?

Eventually, three people, including Schwartz, went up to the balcony and tried to smile as the crowd applauded them. Afterwards, as the afterparty began, they all tried to hold in their confusion and hurt, but it was too much. They asked Raasted to leave, along with his baby and his girlfriend, and spend the night in a nearby hotel. “I said, ‘Okay. I think that’s weird, but I’ll do that,” Raasted said.

Some of the staff thought that Raasted was trying to manipulate the situation to his advantage, and that he brought his baby and girlfriend along to make himself look as innocent as possible. Others thought he was just clueless. According to Schwartz, the truth was probably both. “I actually believe he was shocked,” they said. “I also suspect that he was also trying to control the narrative. He was worried that we were going to make an announcement of our own.”

Raasted said multiple times that he regretted coming, and that he’d tried to boost morale the wrong way. “I thought it would be a nice surprise,” he said. “But I never should have done that.” He maintained, however, that he neither pushed Swistak nor cut her off. He may have touched her back in passing, he said, but that was it. If anyone thought otherwise, it was unfair criticism, he said.

“One of the nice things about being a white, cisgender male is that most of the world is made for your benefit,” he said. “One of the not-so-nice things is that sometimes you are the villain by definition, and a little bit of collateral damage is the price you pay. And that’s fair enough.” A moment later, Raasted’s tone changed: “I came because I was the goddamn owner of the company.” Raasted and his family flew back to Copenhagen the next day. The rest of the Dziobak staff cleaned up the castle, loaded the larpers onto buses out of Lesna, and prepared for the next event. They had another nine larps to run.

After the Cursed CoW, Raasted didn’t just have to contend with angry employees. He once again had to deal with angry members of the larp community. A customer who had been upset to see Raasted interrupt Swistak and push her out of the way at the Cursed CoW posted about their frustration on a private Facebook group.

This is honestly a very hard thing for me to write, because I understand there could be major repercussions for myself mentally, emotionally, and career wise. However, after this weekend’s events I reached my breaking point.

Friends, it’s time to discuss Claus Raasted’s behavior towards women in his company and in this larp scene, and it’s time to come up with some solutions to the powerful men in our international scene and how they impact us.

This weekend was College of Wizardry 13, which was being run not by Claus, but by Agata Swistak who has taken over the administration of these events for sometime. She was lead organizer and made sure that everything was going well, and generally taking up the full burden of the entire event along with her crew, many of them non binary or women. They provided a solid event, and at the end after the larp was done Swistak made a gorgeous speech or rather she was in the middle of a gorgeous speech and about to thank her NPCs and Helpers when uninvited and unannounced Claus (who no one knew was coming) burst through the doors and essentially pushed her aside at her own event and spoke over her.

His speech was about how many of the crew (including Swistak) were leaving and how this was the last time they’d all be together (except Swistak mentioned earlier they had many many more events to do, proving this grandstanding false). Many players were brand new and had no idea who he was, since he had not been coming or running these events for some time. His presence was completely a surprise for literally all but one person (an employee of his who was not on the event team) and because of this at least one person had a panic attack as he is on their list of unsafe attendees.

In short: He took over an event he wasn’t even organizing, in what looked like a power play to undermine a female organizer who recently turned in her resignation. This is not new behavior. I have personally witnessed him harass and belittle the same women continually, and have also been treated to this treatment. Many times when discussing Claus I am told the following:

1. He listens eventually.

2. He’s just Danish. So…

3. He’s come a long way.

4. There’s nothing we can do.

5. Everyone has a “Claus moment”.

What I witnessed at Cow 13 was unacceptable, and I am no longer willing to watch the women in his company and in the larp scene be swept aside and told we can’t say anything or do anything about powerful men who undermine, prey upon, and otherwise belittle women. This behavior is unacceptable, and we all deserve more.

Larpers began leaving comments on the post that detailed their problems with Raasted. Some described times when they felt like Raasted had sexually harassed them. Others brought up rumors of Dziobak’s financial instability. The comments kept pouring forth from larpers all over the world, as if a dam had broken. The larpers, most of whom were women, were clear: They were not going to tolerate Raasted any longer.

On October 10, 2018, three days after the Cursed CoW, Dziobak announced that, though Claus Raasted would still be involved with the company, he was no longer its CEO. “We don’t know yet what the future holds, but we have every intention of running the events already planned,” the post reads. “Our production team is currently running Convention of Thorns and they still have a busy schedule ahead of them.”

What Kotaku asked about his removal as CEO, Raasted at first sidestepped the Facebook thread. The chief reason he stepped down, he said, was because he was fatigued. “I was worn out and exhausted and barely functioning, and trying to do five jobs at once, while not getting proper sleep. On top of that, there were people (both inside and outside Dziobak) who had lost trust in me as the leader of the company,” said Raasted.

When asked directly about the Facebook thread, Raasted said that “there were online discussions that made me question whether all the pain of being the front man for Dziobak was worth it. I decided that it wasn’t, but tried to find a solution where the company could live on under the leadership of others.”

For the rest of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, Dziobak remained in operation. Ostensibly, the company was preparing to run the new larps they had advertised for 2019. Meanwhile, the workers who had left Dziobak at the end of 2018 were trying to figure out what their lives meant without Dziobak. “In January, something just broke,” said one former staff member. “When I quit and I came back home, I had a breakdown which lasted over a month.” They attributed the breakdown to the constant stress they’d had to handle over the previous year.

On March 5, Dziobak shut down for good. Raasted, still acting as the head of the company even though he was no longer CEO, made the announcement in a public memo titled “The Dream Is Dead.”

“Dziobak Larp Studios is halting operations. And it hurts like hell,” he wrote. All employees and contractors were fired, and all larps were canceled. Creditors remained unpaid. However, Dziobak would not be filing for bankruptcy. Raasted didn’t want the loss of control over company property that comes with declaring bankruptcy under Danish law. This way, Raasted could be savvy about selling off Dziobak’s assets, he argued in the memo.

Larpers who bought tickets to an upcoming larp called Gangs of Birmingham, which was scheduled for March 24 through 26, peppered Dziobak’s Facebook page with questions. Some were understanding of Dziobak’s financial failure, but others were furious. Not only had they shelled out hundreds of euros for the ticket, but they’d already booked flights to and from the UK. According to one ticketholder for Gangs of Birmingham, most people ended up getting their ticket money back. However, there was no way to get flight refunds. “It’s kind of a sensitive subject,” said the person, who asked to remain anonymous.

For a few days, the fate of College of Wizardry was up in the air. But before the week was out, The Company P, a Swedish production company, posted an Indiegogo campaign raising money to keep College of Wizardry alive at Czocha Castle. Eager College of Wizardry fans poured money into the campaign, which drew in $100,000 by May 1. That was enough to keep the planned spring events going. The Company P re-hired some Dziobak staff to make the transition between companies smoother. For the larp participants, little changed. (Christopher Sandberg, head of The Company P, initially agreed to answer questions over email for this story, but ultimately did not respond.)

As for Raasted, he said that he now knows Dziobak never had a sustainable business model. “Dziobak is a stellar example of how not to run a larp business,” he said. “It was built on enthusiasm and willpower, and as it got more and more into debt, I kept trying to make the dream work instead of realizing that the fundamentals were broken. Lesson learned.”

Raasted also said he is personally $1,000,000 in debt to various creditors. “I’m going to be spending the rest of my life paying off those debts,” he added. “But such is life. You gamble and trust it’ll turn out okay, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Raasted’s initial response to Kotaku was via a seven-page Google document full of answers to Kotaku’s queries. Over and over again, he admitted that he had made mistakes. What he seemed only vaguely aware of was the effects those mistakes had on others. After all, it’s one thing to gamble with creative visions and personal dreams. It’s another to gamble with the livelihood and mental health of a workforce that, at its peak, included 40 people.

Books Schwartz compared it to the hubristic downfall of the Fyre Festival. “A lot of us (ex-Dziobak team members) watched the Fyre Festival documentaries together,” they said. “It was very anxiety-triggering, because so many quotes people said were word-for-word things we’d heard from Claus.” Like the workers who had their lives upended by the Fyre Festival disaster, some ex-Dziobak workers are still grappling with the effects of the company’s crunch culture on their lives.

Agata Swistak hasn’t given up on designing larps as a career, but now she’s looking for sustainable, healthy employment. She hasn’t been able to find a job that fits that description, so she’s been a freelance larp designer since the beginning of 2019. “I think in the future, I would like to start my own company,” she said. She conceded that her new dream might sound strange, given her mistreatment at Dziobak, but she said she still wants to “create those spaces, like we did at College of Wizardry, where people feel safe and can have meaningful connections.” But first, she said, she has to focus on herself. She didn’t have enough time to do that while at Dziobak.

The American company Learn Larp still exists, but its future, too, is uncertain. In the summer of 2019, Maury Brown and Ben Morrow had to contend with a lawsuit from the College of William and Mary, the site of 2017's New World Magischola. According to the lawsuit, Learn Larp failed to pay almost $70,000 in facility fees. “There were breach of contract issues on both sides,” said Brown, who mentioned that William and Mary failed to provide ADA-compliant facilities to New World Magischola participants with disabilities. The lawsuit was settled in August, according to Brown. (The office of the Virginia attorney general did not respond to a request for comment.)

Brown was dismayed to see a wave of news items with headlines like “A Harry Situation” and “Virginia College Wants Wizardry School’s $70K Debt To Vanish.” “My attorney was like, ‘This is like a contract dispute. I do 10 of these a day,’” Brown said. “It’s only in the news because it’s not a pizza shop or whatever.” She added that she was afraid the larping community would use the lawsuit as a reason to lump Learn Larp in with Dziobak as a failed business venture.

But New World Magischola has experienced a drop in attendees over the years, according to a Facebook post from October 17, and that means that Learn Larp will not run its flagship game in 2020. “The larger-scale larp event market, in the US and abroad, has grown. This has made players selective about where to spend their discretionary funds and time off,” the post read. Instead of standard New World Magischola, the company is pivoting to smaller events at boutique venues, like Punderson Manor near Cleveland and the Mansions on Fifth in Pittsburgh. “We expect NWM to return in 2021, very likely on the West Coast,” Brown said in a follow-up conversation over email. In addition, she said, Learn Larp needs downtime. “We also feel that NWM needs a rest so we can revise the lore and the design and give our producers and directors a break.”

Books Schwartz has left the larp design industry for the game design industry, and has moved to Beijing as a creative lead for the mobile game studio Microfun. Earlier this year, they reached out to The Company P and offered to work on the new version of College of Wizardry, but didn’t get an offer. However, they’re impressed with the Swedish company’s work so far. “I think College of Wizardry can, with reasonable, functional business management, be a very profitable enterprise and a stable business plan,” they said.

Schwartz is adamant that blockbuster larps as a whole still have the potential to create transformative, yet safe fun for designers and players alike. “I hear so many questions about, ‘oh, even College of Wizardry failed, blockbuster larps were a mistake!’ And I just want to shout that no, actually, College of Wizardry was successful!” said Schwartz. “The problem was Claus and his terrible business decisions. Blockbuster larps can still work!”

While Raasted may be severely in debt, the crash and burn of Dziobak has apparently not affected his ability to market larping to tech, entertainment, and travel companies. In 2016, Raasted and Bulencea began producing the College of Extraordinary Experiences, a business-to-business conference. When Dziobak folded, Raasted, Bulencea, and Philipp Jacobius started a new company, with Bulencea as its CEO, in order to keep running the College of Extraordinary Experiences. According to the event’s website, guests in 2020 will include screenwriter and producer Marti Noxon, a staff writer from the CW television show Charmed, and a senior producer from Apple.

Larping is based on the strength of collective imagination, of people who decide that the rules of reality don’t apply for a while. The people who make these larps possible, however, are not imaginary. Just as players experience the world of a larp bleeding into the rest of their lives, larp designers have to deal with the real-world consequences of the larp industry, like low pay, poor mental health, or sexual harassment.

Businesses that run larps have to figure out how to fix these problems if they want to survive as an industry. “If you’re going to profit from (larping) in some way, which I’m not even sure you can do at this point, acknowledge that this is not a normal business,” said former Dziobak freelancer Nicole Winchester. “Acknowledge that you have to keep people’s emotional safety in mind.” Companies that ignore this rule may find that they burn bright for a moment, but disappear noisily, something like a lightning bolt.

Elizabeth Ballou is a writer and MFA candidate in game design at NYU’s Game Center. Her horse in Stardew Valley is named after pasta. Her World of Warcraft character is named after Martha Stewart’s horse.