What Does “safety calls” Mean?

Safety calls are agreed words or gestures that let anyone in a LARP pause, slow down or stop play immediately.

Part of speech

noun, usually plural

Category

LARP terminology

Meaning in context

Two different things at an event get called a call, and the difference matters when one of them is shouted. An in-game call carries a rule, a word thrown with a blow to flag something no prop could show. A safety call is addressed to the people instead of the characters. It sits in the same layer as everything else that is out of character, and the scene gives way to it.

No list will tell you which words your own game uses. Johanna Koljonen put it flatly in a 2020 journal paper: “An individual interaction mechanic can never be ported wholesale to another larp.” The rulebooks bear her out. One British university club uses the plain words STOP THE GAME, and asks anyone who hears them to drop character and stand still. A lightest-touch boffer game names Hold and Caution, and tells players they do not get to rule afterwards that a call was not worth making. A third splits its vocabulary in two: anybody may shout Man Down for an injury, arms waved overhead, while Time-Freeze and Drop belong to the referees. Which is what the briefing at the start of an event is for.

Weight varies as much as wording. Norwegian larp’s kutt stops play where it stands, and everyone in earshot is expected to help with whatever caused it: real injury, or at games pitched hot enough for bleed to be part of the draw, a personal boundary crossed. Brems, brake, declares no emergency and halts nothing. It says only that the scene is going somewhere the player would rather it did not, which makes it cheap to use.

Where it comes from

Nobody recorded who first put the two words together. The individual calls are better documented. Kutt came out of Norwegian larp in the 1990s and kept its Norwegian spelling and pronunciation wherever it spread, including among Finnish players. Brems was introduced at the Norwegian larp Moriais Vev in 1997 and reached the other Nordic countries in the early 2000s, keeping its Norwegian form too. Part of that rule is that nobody owes an explanation for it once the game is over.

2016 produced a cluster of English-language additions with named authors. Koljonen credits the OK Check-In, a hand sign asking another player whether they are all right and answered thumbs up, level or thumbs down, to Maury Brown, Sarah Lynne Bowman and Harrison Greene, built that year for an American wizarding larp and taken from scuba diving. The Lookdown, a hand held flat at the brow so you can leave a scene without being followed, she and Trine Lise Lindahl worked out in an Oslo bar that spring.

Examples

• The briefing is ten minutes long and half of it is the safety calls, so do not turn up at nine for a nine o'clock start.
• Someone used the safety call from the treeline and forty people stopped mid-swing, which is exactly what it is there for.
• Their safety calls are not the ones I learned at my last game, so I wrote the two new ones on the back of my hand.

More from the dictionary

This entry is part of the LARP dictionary, which covers the vocabulary of live-action role-play and the internet slang that grew up around it. The two pillar pages are what LARP is and what larpmaxxing means.