What is the Turku School



The Turku School is a school of thought that promotes character immersion as a the main goal in roleplaying games. There is a Manifesto and several other articles explaining these views. The members of the Turku School have also written and produced dozens of live and tabletop roleplaying games, most of which have been based on Turkuist ideas.

The School was first mentioned in passing around 1996 or 1997, and since then kept expressing their views on Finnish forums. The Vow of Chastity was published in 1999 and the Manifesto in 2000. It was then published online 2001, and in the book As LARP Grows up in 2003, and again in The Foundation Stone of Nordic Larp in 2014. Several translation of the Manifesto have also been published.

The texts created a lot of outrage and criticism, and some of the theoretical problems of the Manifesto were corrected in 2004 in the article Autonomous Identities published in Beyond Role and Play. New concepts such as Steering and their relationship to character immersion and Turkuism have been discussed in later articles. Currently the Turku School serves as a unifying thread among the writing by Mike Pohjola as presented on this site.

The Turku School takes no students at this time.



The Turku School