Diary of a Croatian larper

Lars Andersen is a Danish archer who had undertaken a journey of reviving medieval archery battle techniques. He is also a larper - in fact, that's where he started using bow and arrows, and that's where he was able to get some practice with soft arrows against moving targets. At a fantasy larp. So watch the above video about Lars, narrated by the Danish larper Claus Raasted. It had gone viral in only a few hours. Below you can find his video from 2012: Don't these videos make you want to take archery yourself? :) Discuss in comments. In the meanwhile, here's a few quotes from Lars: ”I recently read about a girl who did Katniss Everdeen (from Hunger Games) cosplay. She'd had to glue the arrows to the inside of the quiver to make sure they didn't bounce out when she ran around. If that doesn't tell us that the back quiver is silly, I don't know what does.” ”Many people have accused me of being fake or have theories on how there's cheatin...

The books for the Nordic larp conference Knudepunkt are usually available around the time of conference. However, this year a new book seems to join the (extensive) collection - The Nordic larp yearbook 2014. Several years ago, the Nordic Larp book was released - a historical anthology of the most significant larps produced in over a decade and a half (nowadays it's available as free digital download). The Nordic larp yearbook 2014  (link will take you to PDF download) is a similar project, sort of a continuation of the idea, but within a smaller scope - only one year. However, it has expanded geographically: there are 18 larps represented there, from nine countries total. All of it is written on over 150 pages (though a large part of it is photos... gorgeous photos). Yes, it has the Harry Potter larp College of Wizardry in it. Did you even have to ask? It covers a lot of other stuff too. Legends. Myths. Horror. Politics. Economics. Zombies. Gender roles. Societies and ...

The PoRtaL larp convention for 2015. has been announced! For those of you that don't know, it's a regional larp conference and it returns to Zagreb this year. It will take place on February 28th - March 1st this year. Entrance is free. By larpers, for larpers. Content will be provided by the participants. For more info, check out the website or facebook . In another news: Steampunk larp "Para pokreće svijet" returns! The only event in 2014 was "Chase", a spin-off event for a rather few people. A new location has been found (that is not a climbing gym). The event will be called Cug (from German Zug, meaning train) and it will represent a train journey.

A lot of larpers (and larp organizers) never think twice about HOW the larp plot is structured - or even created, instead following in the footsteps of their predecessors and how things have always been done. Plot structure can have profound effect on a larp - different plot structure can give a way different feel to how plot works, and can make them look and feel very very different from one another regardless of the rule system used or not used. It is one of the most important aspects of any larp. This article will cover several ways to structure the plot. But of course, this is a place where you can get inventive and combine listed methods, use some of the unlisted or even invent your own. As far as I know, methods of structure so far haven't been categorized in any way, which means I'm probably just inventing the classification here. Yes, feel free to use or modify it for your own purposes (as a reminder: everything I write here is free and reusable , though I could use y...

This year had been rather odd for Croatian fantasy larp in general, and looked very different from the previous years. And some of that change reflected in the Amtgard chapter of Krvomeđe. We pretty much stopped doing regular battlegames and meetings back in Spring, after a few games where only 3 of us bothered to show up - and a far longer period which was very much doom and gloom and people slowly leaving (similar to other groups running similar events). Far from the (most recent) chapter's prime which lasted from late 2011 to early 2013. The only saving grace of the chapter were Rajski Vrhovi events, which are still among the biggest fantasy larps in Croatia, and which went quite well. Out of the blue, after 8 months of inactivity, a battlegame day was announced for Saturday, December 20th. Expectations - due to recent experiences - were minimal. The weather on Saturday turned out to be beautiful. Warm, sunny, and probably the best weather we've seen in over a...

Yesterday's Elysium 43 was a fun game. While Elysiums are rather low-profile Vampire events, this one was quite eventful. Characters started feeling safe and secure - in a stark contrast to last weekend's Sabbat Agram - and events from player perspective played out. A new Harpy was selected, a character who was leaving the town soon IC tried to clean the boons he owed others, etc. But soon there was trouble. A city-wide incident. And it was interesting to see how players would react to it - things were happening fast. It was an interesting response to the situation - a situation to which a lot of players were not used to. A situation which was prophesised some time earlier by some Malkavians which started to act weirder than usual... And so, that was Elysium 43. Starting out with Kindred feeling very safe, and ending with the city that is slightly in flames. These events will continue next Tuesday on Elysium 44 , last event of the year. In other news, I announced...

Sabbat Agram was a one-shot Vampire larp that we played last weekend. Being a one-shot, organizing it differed vastly from Camarilla Agram. Since CA is a campaign - a rather sandboxy and PC-driven one at that - a lot of its' content is set up by players and their continuos, long-term actions through various larps and the downtime system. Sabbat Agram differed in every possible way. Pre-written characters. Pre-generated relations. Writing all the stuff for it took some rather significant time. One-shot event where everything was to happen NOW. Hype was building up. I was carried by it myself, and so were some players. When they showed up in costumes, well... a lot of them were quite awesome, but also rather disturbing. So this is the first larp where I won't be comfortable publishing photos with identifiable faces. Or the performance of certain rituals the characters performed on the event. All of it could be easily misinterpreted as something that it wasn't. The atmo...