Tinderbox

Tinderbox

Larp series	Sheol
Information
Date	1996 (1996)
Duration	around one day
Location	YO-kylä, Turku, Finland
Credits
Designed by	Jori Virtanen
Sheol series
Preceded by Evolution Followed by Burn

Tinderbox was a cypberpunk larp by Jori Virtanen run in Finland in 1996. It was about two street gangs - the booster gang Rednails and the biker gang O-Zone - on the brink of war and set in a gloomy future Detroit in the year 2015 (19 years in the future at the time the larp was run). The design was character based; potential storylines were written into the characters as conflicts, plans, goals and motivations. It was also open-ended in the sense that there was potential of drama and conflict build into the setting but the players could take the larp into the direction they felt right. Some characters were trying to inflame the conflict between the gangs, and others were speaking against it. It was likely but not certain that the situation would escalate (eventually it did). According to a player, the larp was "full of action and very visual".

The larp was set in a cyberpunk world called Sheol, created by Jori Virtanen. He ran a couple of larps and several tabletop roleplaying campaigns there.

Tinderbox was run largely outdoors at a student housing area in Turku, Finland. At one point, the play area was visited by real-world police, since bystanders had been worried about the gang members with their real-looking weapons.

A short description of Tinderbox (in Finnish) can be found from a list of larps that Dare Talvitie played during the time period 1993-2009.

In 1997, Mike Pohjola made a fantasy adaptation of the larp under the name Anglor II, replacing the conflicting gangs with two fantasy tribes. In this version, the conflict did not escalate.