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Reenactments and carnival

Aside from larp, reenactment events and carnival are two other places where you can dress up and pretend to be someone else. Of course they differ in whether the costuming part is viewed as serious business or something downright silly.

With my reenactment/living history group "Red Srebrnog Zmaja" I participated in the recreation of the final battle of the Croatian-Slovenian peasant revolt, which took place exactly 440 years earlier, on February 9th 1573. While the participants' garb was of limited authenticity to the period, the battle itself was quite spectacular, and from my perspective as a participant quite fun. Here's a video of it:


That battle displayed several formations, tactics etc. which I sometimes miss on Croatian fantasy larps (which usually feature small skirmishes instead of big battles), but they remind me of my experience on German larps such as Drachenfest and Mythodea.

Speaking of those two larps, my wife and I portrayed NPCs from them this carnival. I dressed up as my Copper soldier from Drachenfest - though the point was probably easy to miss as the black and white surcoat is common enough. Jasminka was dressed up as a Black Ice rakh from ConQuest. We dressed up our son Damjan in a nice medieval costume we found, and we went out like that last weekend to Samobor (with some American friends who wrote about the experience on their blog) and today to Sesvete (though we arrived a bit late). Here are our photos:



Carnival makes for a good use of our larp clothes - which also serves as a reminder of how our larp wardrobes (particularly medieval/fantasy) have grown large in the past year...

Anyways. Another nice weekend had gone by. Nothing larpy going on, but I guess reenactments and carnival can be seen as possible influences for larping (also, if you live in a country carnival is celebrated in check your stores for costumes - some might have a use in your favorite larp and carnival is 2 more days...), and perhaps a frame of reference of all the ways one is different from another.

Also, if you followed this article so far, here's a nice article on Larpbook - How To Write a Larp Game. Larpbook is another nice site (with Creative Commons content) which sometimes republishes my articles.

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