Diary of a Croatian larper

I am a bit late with my review, but I wouldn't do it justice if I didn't review this year's Lubena, last of this year's large events which happened in late August this year. It's both the second largest event that happened in 2011. (after Jaska 8), and the one which was organized on the smallest terrain. Three camps were formed which were rather close by, but mostly it didn't matter much because of the dense foliage on the terrain... Mostly. It didn't offer the barbarian camp enough protection from one very pissed off mage because they were in his range when he woke up, but that's a long story... The terrain on Lubena - or Majčin Gaj as it's called in-game - isn't really suited to monsters. Which is OK, because there weren't any. Instead, players had strange things happening to them... Like everybody waking up and finding a bone in one of their arms turned to jelly, with healing spells offering just a temporary solution before it happened...

Back in August I visited the Rajski Vrhovi XV event. It was with my new character, so this would be my first event where I'd play a Frenchman for the first time. Basically, the roleplay was awesome - after 8 years of playing my previous character it was quite a refreshment. I even got a girlfriend or three during the event (purely in-game of course). One of those in-game relationships would grow into something else in the next couple of weeks at Lubena event... But I'll talk about that in its own article. The event was home to probably the best dungeon I've seen in Croatian LARPs. Lots and lots of traps. Perhaps it took a bit too long to solve, but it was memorable for sure. The lost crystals of Veles were not found, which spells trouble for the next Rajski Vrhovi event (draught and stuff). And a vojar appeared - they are a particularly troublesome bunch of near-invulnerable dark elven undead warrior-necromancers, originating from Osijek LARPs at Utvrda Svijetlosti ...

While each of us has a unique experience every LARP, the one I had on Jaska 8 this July was shared by very few people... All of them in the same trouble as me. Have you seen the LARP movie "The Wild Hunt"? Well, it didn't really end that way. But there was a wild hunt. On my character, baron Maksimilijan Vurnovečki, count Vilijam Kruška and our supporters. We were hunted savagely - with search parties, hunting horns etc, while trying to rally more supporters to our cause. It didn't work - most players were either afraid or indifferent to help us, or wary of getting tangled up in in-game politics as we were. In the end, we went and got ourselves executed. There wasn't much more we could do while our supporters kept dying, except run away which wasn't in our character. So we figured it was better to throw ourselves at the mercy of our prosecutors (with execution being the most likely outcome) than to die somewhere in the bushes an hour or three later or leav...