I’m Going to Live Here Forever:
On Joining Wayfinder as an Adult Staff
When I first interviewed for the Wayfinder Experience, before I knew much about it or LARP at all, one of the questions I was asked was how would I feel entering into a space that tended to be tight-knit and full of history well known to its members. Most Wayfinder staff grew up as Wayfinder campers and so many of them had already grown close. I answered that I was excited for it. I love to join a well-oiled community and I find myself slipping into places pretty easily, even when I have little context for them.
My first summer with Wayfinder was beautiful. It is how I imagine the campers feel their first time at Wayfinder. During Staff Week (our training weekend), I experienced one of the most formative moments of my life. I think about it often. I sat on a hill watching the sun set over a field of tall grass and fireflies. I remembered that I was grateful to still be here, to be a part of the magic that Wayfinder makes. If you are anything like me or most of the members of Wayfinder’s community, you grew up grasping for any little bits of magic you could find- reading Maximum Ride books under the dinner table, watching Doctor Who late at night snuggled up, daydreaming I could save the world during classes at school. It did not strike me until I was older that I am responsible for making my own sort of magic. Magic is real. It exists in the bonds we form, the communities we build, and the ways we invite it in.
What I failed to understand about Wayfinder at first is why its community is so well facilitated
and so many return to it year after year, with so many growing up in its environment. I attribute
the community Wayfinder has built to their commitment to play. I come from a background of
social work and therapy, working with people of all ages. In therapeutic spaces, play is often
talked about for children but rarely mentioned for adults. Play is how we form relationships,
navigate our identities, and practice feeling emotions on different levels. And as we get older, we
leave play behind, even though it never stops being fruitful. We stop jumping in puddles and
using silly voices. We stop allowing ourselves the space to experiment and practice our feelings,
when actually those activities would continue to be as therapeutic now as they were when we
were five. Because of Wayfinder’s commitment to play, its environment tends to also be
therapeutic to its campers, many of whom are navigating their identities and emotions, some of
them for the very first time. That space exists and works for staff as well.
For me, the first way I learned to take up space was in theater. I did community theater as a child and grew up in a tightly knit community, much like Wayfinder. Tapping into the edges of myself, seeing how far I can stretch my presence and then seeing how I might draw it back in to allow others to shine was an important lesson for me to learn. Not coincidentally, this lines up with what we teach kids in workshops at camp, how we invite kids to play with each other and learn how to walk through life are one and the same.
I have not always found being a human to be easy. I regularly feel out of place, and I don’t feel built to exist in this world. I have an extensive background not only in treating others but in receiving treatment myself. In fact, for me, treating and treatment are parallel processes. That twin process of healing yourself while offering help to others tends to be true for members of the Wayfinder community as well. Joining as a staff member, I felt how therapeutic it was to find my way through the community while creating space for and playing right along with the
campers..
Sitting on that hillside, I felt invited. I felt held. I had chosen to play with these people and they
chose to play with me. The sky was an orange haze and the field was drowning in fog and I was
in a fairytale. There is a saying at Wayfinder that the land plays with us at times, implying that
not only are we players but that play is innate in everything around us. The way I needed to fit
into Wayfinder was playing along with its environment. It was not so much that I was in a
fairytale then but that we, together, had created a space so present and open that it felt unreal.
I won’t say finding my place in the space was always easy. There are inside jokes decades old
that I can’t grasp and there’s levels of trust built that I was not there for. However, what
Wayfinder invites as well is an opportunity for growth in tandem and with the support of others.
Theater also did not come easily to me as well when I first started. I was short and quiet and
terrified that someone would see right through me and dislike me if they were to see me on stage.
That I would finally find the bravery to step up and show myself all for everyone to decide I
wasn’t worth space at all. In my life outside of theater as well, I was the same. I made friends
that walked all over me and spent countless hours praying in class that no one would notice me.
And yet, I wanted to be noticed. I wanted to be seen. And slowly I began to do the scary thing-
leaping without looking, projecting my voice to the back row, standing up straight on the stage. I
realized that there was a space for me, if only I would make it and let myself in. I played Glinda
in the Wizard of Oz, her arms stretched wide. I played Grace in Annie, brimming with love and
hope. I started directing and the space became even more mine. Eventually I was able to step up
and stand out. I forged strong relationships in theater with not only others, but myself. And I
began to do the same at Wayfinder.
Making friends is hard work but it’s good work if you can get it. It’s exactly the kind of work Wayfinder asks of its community members- to be open and brave and kind even when the rest of the world is not that way. It asks for a commitment to your community and yourself, making it clear that you are part of community care. I have always heard staff stress that the environment we build at camp can be brought outside of camp to the rest of the world. I took this advice and set off running, introducing my dnd group to Wayfinder where they found places for themselves too. Additionally, I am now close enough to some staff members to consider them close friends and a few even attended my wedding. The campers that attend Wayfinder know who I am and consider me a role model. These relationships we have cultivated are tended to by the members of the Wayfinder community and as I have grown within it,my confidence and identity have grown with me. Wayfinder was the first place where I played with my pronouns, trying on new ones, feeling them wrap around me and dress me up until I felt just right. It is where I declared love for people I had just met and people I have known for years. There’s a Wayfinder overnight summer camp tradition called Bardic Circle, where staff and campers perform music and plays and comedy routines. Every year I read the poem I wrote my first summer that finishes with:
Everything smells green.
I am perfect.
I am going to live forever here.
I didn’t grow up here but I am going to grow old here.
By Ollie Mantoani Dec. 2025
Wayfinder grew off a similar organization called Adventure Game Theater, which has since been absorbed into Wayfinder. Our programming grew directly from the systems and work that AGT did. Many parts of our system were built around DND spells and other systems that people were familiar with, but as with many LARPs our systems have evolved to reflect the people in the community and the ways in which we play our games. The Adventure Game as a LARP system started in 1986 (before Magic the Gathering for some nerd street cred) and has been being updated, tweaked, and adapted ever since. There is no one person who created our system (which contains a base system of 5 classes and over 100 abilities, with other auxiliary powers and classes available for use in less standard game settings and several variations on improv magic instead of our class based system). There have been a number of people who have worked on it over the years. The current system that is in play was largely developed and updated by Conor Gillespie, Griffin Johnston, Jack Covell, and Brennan Lee Mulligan in the mid aughts, but it has since been updated by our administrative staff and is undergoing regular updates and reworkings to keep it feeling fresh and in line with the way that games our played today!
The swords are central to what we do. It is the easiest way to grasp LARP for an outsider. It can be hard to take on a character, to tell a story, to invest in the small details of a world that isn’t your own, but it is very easy to understand that getting hit with a sword is bad and getting a chance to swordfight is fun. On top of the access to different types of play, swords are a hugely appealing thing to many participants (new, returning, young, and old). There aren’t that many chances to safely hit each other with things or to simulate battle. As purely an experience, it’s a fun and fairly unique one (not a ton of drop in LARPs that are easily accessible for kids). For many of us who want to be active but are not necessarily the most athletic, it provides the chance to get to play in some athletics with some leveling in the reality of there’s always the chance to fight your way out. Add on top the ability to scream and die together, live out the epic battles you’ve seen or read in so many books, movies, and video games, and the list of reasons to love swords stretches on almost endlessly.
Campaign play allows us to spend more time with a particular character and story line, to carry our characters forward through a series of events and construct singular narratives around the different stories they find themselves at the center of. Characters always provide us a reflection of ourselves, a vision into another way that we could be and interact with those around us. Returning to a character can feel like coming home to yourself. Characters can share a lot with us, they may be good, they may be evil, but whoever they are, the distance they provide from our everyday selves brings a newness into the body that can be very welcoming. The longer you play as a particular character, the more of that character’s life you will hold in your memory.
Last summer we returned to having linked Campaign style Adventure Games as a part of our summer offerings. Over the course of two weeks of camp players were introduced to a world that our staff had collaborated to build the mythology of. People built characters that had to face off against an ancient evil, a lich who had found a way to once again crawl out of death. In our first week characters fought an increasingly desperate battle to stem the tides of undeath, to hold this evil back before it swallowed the world. They were successful, but at the price of a large number of their own, including some heroes they had grown to care about. In the second week we opened with a funeral for one of those characters who had passed. Campers and staff alike gave impromptu elegies that brought a solemn warmth to the scene, and made it all the more upsetting when the character rose again possessed by the lich. Playing in the same world over the course of multiple weeks, made everything feel more familiar, more lived in. Campers were able to share stories and lore with one another. The world became truly collaborative. 
After the summer we had two opportunities to return to our campaign world. At our Adult Retreat we played a prequel that took place in the same world, giving a perspective to characters and storylines from the summer. Many of our staff, having worked over the summer, found themselves getting the chance to play as PCs in earlier storylines that tied into their experiences over the summer. A number of them found this deepened their experience, they already felt connected to the mythology and the chance to build into that world in its early days provided a unique LARP experience for them. 
This summer we will be having two more linked games. Building out these games is a fun design challenge. We have to craft two games that are stand alone stories, but played together they show a full story arc, and as with all of our Adventure Games, the storyline that we play wraps up, the campaign does not stretch forward forever. It is a hallmark of our Adventure Games that we build these worlds and these characters, inhabit them, and continue into the next story. This summer at our first two weeks of Overnight Camp we will be playing linked games and hope to see you there! What will you build with us? Where does your story lead?
Always Coming Back Home To You
Due to the setup of our community around a summer camp, there is always going to be some change in the people who are attending. People’s lives move forward. They go to college. They get jobs. They move on to whatever the world holds next for them. Spending summers at camp you get used to the rotating nature of the people around you. Every time someone new comes to camp it’s a chance to bring someone new into the fold. It’s always exciting to see what they bring into the space with them. New games. New ideas. There’s also, almost guaranteed, to be a friend who has been long absent. Someone who wasn’t able to be at camp for whatever reasons, or you two just haven’t been at the same weeks. Every camp is a chance to reenter these friendships. The function of being a summer camp means that the majority of the people at camp will not see each other maybe nine months out of the year. The friendships we have suspend in time, they tie to the space we hold at camp. It’s why it’s so easy for us to come and go in each other’s lives, to maintain relevance, as Marika put it so well a few weeks ago. We have grown use to coming home to each other.
I’ve lived in six states and three time zones. I’ve told myself more springs than I’d like to admit that the coming summer would be my last one at camp, that it was time for me to grow up and move on to a new home. In 2014 I didn’t go to camp for the first time since I started in 2003. The year that followed was one of the hardest, most isolated of my life. There were a lot of external strains that led to this throughout the year as well, but I would be lying if I didn’t notice the weight of not getting to come home to camp and be me. Not having the time to put my stress aside and sit in a circle and fall asleep in the grass when I’m probably not supposed to (OK I’m definitely not supposed to and am probably supposed to be running the circle). Camp is my home. Who knows how long we get to call any one particular place home? If you get the chance to, come back. We miss you.
Recently I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about play and what it is. I’ve been taking a class on play theory (one of many reasons my writing of this blog has lagged so heavily) in which we have been looking at different definitions of play that people have had throughout the years and the implications of each one. Wayfinder is the reason I signed up for the course. Seeing as we talk about and engage in play so much within our community, I wanted to get an idea of what the broader view on the topic was. As we’ve progressed I’ve also been looking at my own beliefs as to what play is, what role it holds in this community, and what play has done for me. I’ll probably write more of the personal responses to play as time passes but for right now I want to look at some of the ways play applies to camp at large.
Closing circle at camp almost always includes a specific message and call to action: the things we do at camp can be brought out into your regular life. This isn’t to say that you’re going to get everyone you meet to break out into LARPing games at school or in your day to day lives, but instead that much of the work we do on ourselves at camp can be applied to ourselves outside. Personally the comfort and confidence I have found in myself through Wayfinder has allowed me to navigate social situations for the past 14 years of my life. It’s taken a combination of the different types of skills and knowledge I gained through camp in order to be able to cultivate those qualities in myself.
While there has been a lot of discussion of “creating space” on this blog (and generally is at any Wayfinder event), little focus has been given to what kind of space Wayfinder is to begin with. It may seem kind of strange to try and diagnose a space which has no connection to a specific location (our office and storage facility notwithstanding, there is no one place which contains the Wayfinder Experience), but for the purpose of discussion space refers to whatever space we occupy together as a community and not the land itself. Wayfinder exists as a transformational space. The nature of this movement, combined with the variable make up of community members (both staff and participants) at any event, and the type of personal, introspective work we do allows transformations from community members to go unquestioned.
