LarpCraft BMC Quest 1

Intro speech

The face of Croatian larp scene today looks way different than three years ago when this blog started. There are many more larps today, and they're way more differentiated. However, while I'm the first one that would say such shift is positive, it made larping more involved. I admit - I'm an addict of immersion, bleed and player-driven plots, but still there are mornings when I just wanna wake up, go in the woods and slay a few orcs and save the village.

Last year a couple of us started Camarilla Agram Vampire larp. And it works marvelously as a common larp that can be played every week - but we have lost that option in fantasy. Few fantasy larps in the area function as the ongoing campaigns nowadays for more than two events a year.

So a month and a half ago we opened a Croatian chapter of LarpCraft called Bear Mountain Colony. We found it to be a very scalable system with an awesome back-end, something that will support a continuous campaign well.

We presented it to people, both online and on SFeraKon. The response was... well, far less numerous than we hoped for to be honest.

We found a nice location in Maksimir park near the 3rd lake. Two weeks ago I ran the demo. You didn't see the report - there wasn't much to report anyway. Only two people came, and they got a nice demo of the system. Some rain and hail caught us, and overall it was quite an adventure.

Today, yes... the same two players, plus the two of us organizers. Though to be honest, I was just the loudmouth this time, doing some marketing and lending the gear - Ivan Kalinić basically wrote the lore and the plot for this event, which is important as this is basically an introduction to future events.

How did it go? How did the four-people event run? Well, the answer might surprise you - it ran really tight. Pacing was great, everybody had fun, nobody got our of character during the larp and we had plenty of nice role-play.

The larp structure was linear, with four different larp locations. I basically played my Drachenfest character (Vjenceslav) rebuilt in this system, and I took the role of an informed character. My character had the visions where to go, so I was acting as a guide to players. The two new players were playing their own characters - a warrior and a ranger - and the three of us made a nice adventuring party.

Fire-servant encounter

Ivan set the locations and props up and played various NPCs for the event, plus his own character Quasarius.

The rest of us went from location to location, trying to understand the plot (or deliberately misinterpreting it to fit our worldview), etc. Two locations (out of four) included encounters that we resolved through combat.

But not everything was solving stuff. We discussed our past, military tactics, religion etc. and had a quite powerful dying scene.

After the larp, we all went together for dinner and beer. Everyone involved was pleased. So, was the larp success or not? While it brought in far lower number of people than we hoped to, it turned out to be not only a very good small-population event, but also the way to show how it's done. I must say that so far I have never seen a fantasy event with less than 10 people that ran so smoothly.

I'm looking forward to return to next event and see how plot develops...

All photos are available here.

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 .

Diary of a Croatian larper

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