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

Campaign Style Play

At Wayfinder, the majority of our Adventure Games are written as One Shots. We imagine worlds that we visit only once, stepping into them to shape the course of monumental events, before moving onto the next, carrying those stories and characters only in our memories. We do, on occasion, delve deeper into worlds and engage in campaign style play, returning to the same world across multiple camps or One Day events and allowing player choices, and the stories that they shape, to run their course. 

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.

We often talk about the opportunity for self-exploration that is afforded to us through Live Action Role-Play (LARP). One Shot play doesn’t afford us less of this, but it is simply different. For years, our One Day Adventure Games have offered linked storylines, allowing players to continue the same character across multiple games for as long as that character survives. It provides us with a personal stake and investment in a storyline that is different than may be offered to us anywhere else. Anyone who’s played in a tabletop campaign may have experienced this kind of character play. I have found that there is a difference when I am physically embodying the character. The stakes feel more personal, the intensity more immediate, and the joys more personal.

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. 

We also returned to this world for our Winter Game, bringing a new problem that arose directly out of choices that the campers made in Games over the summer. Demons arrived, ready to claim the world and lay waste to it, having been given the power to do so inadvertently by a deal the campers had made this summer. Once again the forces of good had to rally to hold off the certain destruction of their world. Before the Adventure began though, I saw campers teaching each other lore and mythology that they had built this summer, telling stories about their characters, helping to ensure that the players who were joining this campaign for the first time would share in that same depth of experience and mythology as the ones who had already been there to be in the world. 

Take it directly from Finn, one of our campers who played in all of the Song of the Dead series except for the adult retreat, “I had a fantastic time playing the three Song of the Dead games, each addition to the trilogy adding a unique level of depth to the world that I already knew and loved. Being able to play on the same PC team numerous times gave us the time to add our own little details, like a few words of a language, and it was really cool to see the new players of that same group change up bits and pieces and use it as their own! (OSIMALNI HOO HOO HOO)”

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?

 

Written by Judson Easton Packard. Jan. 2024