The Tolkien Effect

2002-2004 were the years of highest fantasy larp growth in Croatia, the unprecedented growth when the population of larpers doubled in three short years. This growth coincides with the release of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, from December 2001. to December 2003.

Peter Jackson's trilogy - an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic - had a tremendous impact on the industry, popularizing the fantasy genre (both in literature, onscreen, in video games and in role-play), and making it it more mainstream and commonplace.

The Hobbit, which comes out this week, could make another impact. Probably not as much as LoTR, but significant enough to contribute to an increase in the general interest about fantasy in the next three years as movies come out (probably helped by the ongoing Game of Thrones on HBO, which already caused a spark of interest of its own).

This is a likely window of opportunity for all fantasy larps to gather as much interested people as possible and ride the popularity of the Tolkien Effect. Use this to enrich the hobby - get your friends to larp.

On a side note: I'm going to the movie screening this Wednesday evening with my wife. I also purchased the Kindle version of the book - interestingly, cheaper than the price of a movie ticket.

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The 15 rules of larp

The following 15 rules (warning: strong language) were written some years ago in Great Britain, and have been pretty much generally accepted on the British larp scene. Especially popular is rule 7 - widely known by its number and commonly considered to be the most imortant rule of all (and I agree). Even the biggest British larp forum has taken Rule7 as its name. The rules have been originally created by the Drunken Monkeys and edited by Rick Wynne who added some extra stuff in the explanations to make them more understandable to international audience (it still contains some British larp lingo though), more work-safe and to throw in his two cents. (copy of the original wording is available here ) 1. Don’t play a mighty warrior; play a warrior and be mighty. Don’t label your character. As soon as you say that you are the best swordsman in the land someone will come along and kick your ass. Just get into the mindset of the person and role-play it out. 2. No one cares about you...

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...

Discord is up

More stuff from my PoRtaL XII talk, Larps and Information Technology , seem to be coming true. In particular, the part about technology becoming old. And so it is with this blog. The technology it's built on is getting old and starts to not play as nice with modern browsers, plugins and smartphones as it used to. Specifically, the comment section doesn't seem to work for anyone. So I decided to open a discord to help us all connect in an easier way. If you are interested, join the Crolarper discord server here .

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