Final words, for now

First of all, we want to thank you all, whether you pledged in the crowdfunding, told your friends about the campaign, took part in the discussion on any forum, followed us or liked our posts. Thank you for believing in us and showing your support. While the outcome of the campaign definitely feels like a loss as we are not able to move forward with the project, at the same time it was also a huge success. 400 000€ is an incredible amount to collect in this economy! We are enormously grateful for this community and all the support we got!

What on Ellarion just happened?

What a ride this has been! We’ve worked long evenings on this campaign designing, marketing, doing paperwork, writing blog posts, making videos, scouting locations, trying to find more potential players and getting ready for making this happen. We couldn’t have done it without seeing how many people wanted to see Odysseus come to life again.

In the end we had 344 pledgers from over 20 countries and in total almost 400 tickets purchased. There was only one day during the campaign when we did not get any pledges! Most of our backers came from the United States, Finland and UK, with over 50% of the revenue coming from these 3 countries.

It has been almost 10 years since the first idea of Odysseus, two massive volunteer run productions in 2019 and 2024 and over six months of long hours working with this campaign to see if this story could continue. It has been an incredible journey and we are all extremely privileged to have been able to be a part of it.

Picture: Viima Strengell

What happens next?

The past six months have been quite a crunch for our team and we need time to just take a breather and think about where we go from here. For now we have no concrete plans about the future, but our initial thoughts are that we want to keep working together, dreaming big, and designing awesome experiences for players everywhere. There are other stories to tell and other larps to write. We are considering the possibility of making other games under Ellarion Tales in the future, so for now we are keeping our channels open, but it will be pretty quiet for a while at least.

We are not ready to completely close the door on revisiting Odysseus someday. After 2019 runs we said that we would never do this again, we know better than to say never again. The support and interest we got was huge, even though many were not able to invest so much money in the current situation. We can not nor want to ignore that support. We’d still love to give this experience to anyone who yearns for it. At the same time, we can’t make any promises. It may well be that these are the goodbyes to this story. For now, we know we can’t move forward with Odysseus. We do not have resources, energy nor means to continue working with this and many of our team has spent years with Odysseus and it is time to look forward to other projects.

There is still a little bit of Odysseus work we would love to do though. We have started to compile a DNA-book where you can explore the design, narrative and art of Odysseus. This is something we really want to make for you and for ourselves to commemorate this incredible project. This is something that might move slow or fast depending on our inspiration so for now we can’t promise when it will be published.

We’ve also had interns working on engineering games and a few other things which we plan to publish!

Stay in the loop!

Our community discord will remain open for now, and you’re still welcome to join the discussion! We’ll also keep the Odysseus merch store open and we don’t have any plans on closing it. In fact as we do have some new graphics, and we are planning to do small updates to the merch store at some point. The small cut that we get from merch purchases goes to Illusia ry, the non-profit organization behind Odysseus 2019 and 2024. Currently the money goes towards the storage of set pieces and props from the previous runs of the game.

If you have any questions or want to reach out we are here! We’d love to hear your ideas on what kind of larp adventures you’d want us to take you on here in Finland! Thank you once more and let’s stay in touch!

Header picture: Laura Kröger

Picture: Lenne Eeronketo