It's been way too long without any updates

 

I'm just back from PoRtaL XII, which was back in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, 6 years after PoRtaL VI, which is - incidentally - only 3 posts below this one on my blog, and I still remember it like it was yesterday.

And this means I failed to review the past two year's PoRtaLs, also excellent. Here's some representation for them.

Back during PoRtaL 10 in Krakow, I did a presentation called Designing larps with intent. It was streamed, and can be found on Youtube.

For PoRtaL 10, I also wrote and ran a larp Journey to Tau Ceti - an expanded version of the Arrival at Tau Ceti. I was a mess at documenting it, and it still remains in an unpublishable state. Both of these were run on Friday, which means I haven't really see much else on the convention that day, but I did on Saturday, when I was also able to play Ties that Bind larp by Alexandros Alexiou. I skipped Sunday, as we had to go early to drive home. For documentation purposes, full program listing is here.

At next year's PoRtaL XI - back in Budapest for the third time - I went full tourist mode, the first time so far, and just enjoyed the program. And I wanted more, considering that I missed some fun stuff during the previous year. Here is the full schedule - as long as the site remains up - but I have to single out the fantastic Reaching Out larp by Nina Runa Essendrop, and a lot of great workshops. Still had to leave before the official end of the conference to catch the bus back to Zagreb, but not as early as previous year. Another important achievement of this PoRtaL was a contest that led to publishing several larp scenarios in four different languages.

And now this brings us back to the present and recently finished PoRtaL XII in Plovdiv. I was ready to put some creativity into practice, so I did a presentation on Larps and Information Technology and a newly written larp, Tribes of the Valley, freely available under Creative Commons. While this year only had two program tracks - less then previous years - it was packed with good content, and Sunday program lasted longer than usual, until 18:00. As I flew to the convention this year, and my return flight was only on Monday, this meant I stayed and had an extra day compared to usual. This gave me the opportunity to also play a run of Forgotten Gods city larp created by the multi-country Nausika, Selkie and Erea teams, and facilitated by the Croatian-Greek team of Chiara and Manu; Flavius, a Terrible Creations larp facilitated by Siro; and finally The Pull, a non-verbal game by Alexandros Alexiou. Full agenda is available here.

Two tribes mourning the loss

There were also multiple talks and presentations I've attended, as well as the meets, drinks, dinners and parties after convention time itself, which have been amazing as usual. A lot of participants of the previous years were missed on PoRtaL XII, but there were some new ones, including a group from Belgium. I was asked about some of my old projects.

And they were unavailable.

I failed to take my own advice from Larps and Information Technology. Or rather, I didn't double check everything after the changes of the service they were on.

So I got to work to bring most of my old projects back up online. Even if they are only for archival purposes. Because documentation is important.

And it seems a lot of you think that way. Over the past year, I had record readership on this blog. Even considering I haven't posted anything in almost three years, I had 70% over my previous peak in 2013.

If you're a new reader, let me know in the comments below. I am curious.