Diary of a Croatian larper

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...

A lot of you are probably waiting for a review of last weekend's Sabbat Agram Vampire event. This isn't one, sorry. I still need some time to sort things out properly. But in the meanwhile, let's talk about last Croatian larp events of 2014. There's gonna be 3 of them, and all are going to happen in a week. This Thursday (December 18th) there's gonna be Camarilla Agram Elysium 43 . We're back to the Camarilla flavor of Vampire after some Sabbat craziness. This Saturday (December 20th) there's gonna be an Amtgard game at our Krvomeđe chapter. Yes. These have not been held since April due to the population drop back then. It's gonna be held at its' standard location - near the bank of river Sava, next to the Savica šanci lake in Zagreb. Starting at 13:30 (except if bad weather occurs, but the forecast is good) with a planned duration of about 2 hours, it will offer some sparring, battlegaming and a tournament in several categories. The last event...

Camarilla Agram 8, played last weekend, was the last major event of the year of our Vampire larp Camarilla Agram (well, besides the Sabbat Agram special event on Dec 13th - Camarilla Agram 9 will be played on January 10). Let's be honest - last few major events we have lost the visual edge. At our first event, we brought in a make-up artist and made fangs for our players. At Camarilla Agram 1-3 we were in a small apartment, which was decorated much better every time we were playing. Since Camarilla Agram 4, we moved to the new environment - KKZ. While it was much larger and roomier than our previous location, it was never decorated as much or so densely. And while our costume quality went up, somewhere along the way we have lost the makeup. And the music. And the lighting... Camarilla Agram 8 reversed all those thrends, and with a vengeance. We had skilled people doing makeup - especially visible for Nosferatu players. There was good quality fake blood. All players...

Elysium 39 last week was the 50th Camarilla Agram event ever, and as such it was a bit spiced up compared to usual. Normally, the plot on Elysium events is fully player-decided social sandbox. For a change, Elysium 39 featured a Sabbat ductus who visited the Elysium in a dominated body, and the reaction by most characters was shock and fear. The situation got handled a bit clumsily, but that opened up new avenues to the story. Apart from exploring the Sabbat situation, most of the plot in Elysium 39 and 40 revolved around who will be the new prince (due to the previous events ), and around effectively organizing all the characters from the in-character perspective. Currently there's rather intense plotting and backstabbing going on. We'll see how it ends up on Camarilla Agram 8 this Saturday (reschedule: it will start at 7 PM instead of 6 PM), and how it develops further on future events . And now let's catch up with some local larp news and announcements. E...

Last 2 Camarilla Agram Elysium events - on Friday, November 7 and Monday, November 10 - have been quite memorable. We rarely do our Elysium events on Friday - approx. once every 2 months - because we play them in public places which tend to be more crowded on Fridays. This usually means it's harder to keep in character, and this Friday was no different. However, this Friday was memorable for two things: one, it featured a couple of players who arrived from the city of Rijeka. Two, it started a chain of events which would culminate on Monday's event: abdication of a Prince. This has caused quite a stir in the internal politics. The position of a Prince is now open, and a lot of people started manuevering. Some in attempt to become the next prince, others to profit most from the change... This will continue for 2 more weeks, until a new Prince is elected (or takes power) on Camarilla Agram 8 . However it turns out, we'll have a new balance of power at the end of this y...

The world of Camarilla Agram Vampire larp is often simulated beyond what is easily doable on a larp. This is one of the areas when the complex ruleset used becomes an asset - a transition to the tabletop mode of play is seamlessly done on-the-fly. Several of the early Elysium events were small enough to support a well-rounded tabletop-like party missions near the end, as a change of pace from the social game. But as Camarilla Agram grew, we stopped doing that. Too large parties would be unwieldy for such a mode of play. Last Thursday's Elysium 34 was a change of pace. Its' larp segment lasted only for a minute, while a single scene was played. Two parties sat down (with one player who actually Skyped in), left the Elysium IC and did some missions in the tabletop mode. It wasn't supposed to last as long as it did, but it did - it never returned to the larp mode. Perhaps it would be important to say that Yesterday's Elysium 35 (pictured above) was once again a prop...

Camarilla Agram has grown from the experiment to a huge, popular thing. Last weekend's Camarilla Agram 7 was the 10th major event. In November, we'll have our 50th larp so far in the campaign (Elysium 39). Currently, it's a local poster child larp for a regular campaign/chronicle that runs almost every week. A ritual which totally looks not at all evil. What could possibly go wrong? Due to its' sandbox direction and the fact that it's run continuously, most of the content here is player-made, and a result of interaction between players. Running such a larp is vastly different from one in which a GM prepares all the plot beforehand. It's still done - according to the design goals of the larp - but it's a light push at most. Diplomacy and social interaction are a big part of this larp, and key IC positions are usually expected to be primary motivators to both "get the stuff done" and play their part in the social structure of things. As s...

I can't remember when was the last time when I walked onto one of our Vampire weekly events (Elysium) and NOT see some new players. Was it sometime in August, when most people were at the coast swimming? For my non-Croatian readers, we're a small country. Zagreb is 2 hours away from the coast, and most people go to the coast to spend their holidays there. We usually rent apartments, or go to friends or family down there and chill on the overcrowded pebbly beaches of the Adriatic sea for a week or two, sunbathing and swimming. Not even the crappy weather like this summer can deter us (though it certainly lowers the mood). During July and August, Zagreb seems half-deserted apart from the construction work that gets done in that time. With the arrival of September and a new school year, Zagreb springs back to life. People return to their regular lives and we get the rush hour traffic again. This September (and early October) was supposed to have several big events, but it seem...

The sixth major Camarilla Agram event of this year was played on Saturday in Kino klub Zagreb. As we're running it as a storyteller (GM) team, unfortunately this event's storyteller (Domagoj Krpan) got some work obligations - this ended in two of us running his plot. Several other players were missing due to Liburnicon and Renaissance festival in Koprivnica, so we were down to 21 players this event. Without divulging any potential spoilers, I'll just say it was a lot of fun. Social setting, personal plots and power play, pushing for certain actions, solving some details and plots (and opening new questions), intertwined with mysterious messages and visions. Almost a year has passed since our first Vampire event , and a lot has changed since then. With 3 major intro larps last year, 6 major larps this year, and 29 (together with tomorrow's Elysium 29 ) small weekly events, that would make 38 events in a year. Plenty of time for these changes to come. In thi...

The convention Liburnicon in Opatija starts today. Well, only the outdoor stage. The real stuff starts tomorrow, making it probably the longest Sci-Fi convention in Croatia so far. It's not the only convention in Croatia this weekend - there's Domikon in Donji Miholjac - but it has no RPG content, so it's not going to be subject of this article. Now back to Liburnicon. And it will be full with larp content, thanks to Miroslav Wranka aka Siro who's going to ensure there's larp content on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Convention schedule can be found here . Thursday at 8 PM, there will be a Larp FAQ presentation. Friday at 9:30 PM, expect the Upoznajte larpere ( Meet the larpers ) panel discussion. And be sure not to miss Siro's  Pokret otpora larp (Resistance movement) which will premiere on Saturday at 8 PM. It will be a short (1 hour) Nordic-style chamber larp for six people, featuring pregenerated characters. So make sure you reserve your spot on ...

Hello dear readers! This blog has been inactive for a while. That's because I was on vacation, swimming in the Adriatic sea, relaxing with my family, reading a few books and recharging my batteries. So what happened in these two weeks? I'll start with two larp reviews first. They were played two weeks ago and I was on them but I didn't get the chance to review them before I went to my vacation. Both were played in the same location (Kinoklub Zagreb aka KKZ) on two consecutive days (July 11 for Star Wars 2 and July 12 for Camarilla Agram 5). Star Wars larp 2 (by Ivo Turk and Matija Mihoković) continued the campaign which started in February . But just to clarify: the larp is simply called Star Wars larp, it has nothing to do with the second movie. Its' timeline is just after the end of the Return of the Jedi. Everything that was written for the first event was still pretty much true, most features - positive and negative - remained pretty much the same as in the ...

The fourth chapter of Camarilla Agram Vampire larp was played last night in Kinoklub Zagreb. A total of 37 players joined the event (no visitors from other countries this time), and made this one of the smoothest and most memorable events so far. Excellent role-play, no OOC drama and plenty of memorable scenes made for a powerful evening. Our bartender is actually a V:TES player Player characters set up a high security system at the entrance of the newest Elysium, and there were two checkpoints that everyone had to go through. With everyone searched, auspex-ed, blood-tested and their info entered into prince's database. This did not go down easily and was a large source of conflict in the early game. There was a contest for a new Seneschal (since the old one was revealed to be a Setite), right hand of the Prince, which provided for a content between two main candidates, who tried to discredit each other during the course of the event in several possible ways. There w...

Yesterday's Elysium 13  Vampire game was slightly smaller than usual - a total of 10 players took part in it. I blame the fact on my lack of marketing on Facebook - even though the date was known for over a month (it's visible on larp website ) and I announced it at the end of Elysium 12 , I was otherwise preoccupied so I didn't create a Facebook event until... yesterday. I think it's a good pointer on how much people rely on Facebook for their larp info lately. The event, however, gave us opportunity to do what we can't do with the higher population - after playing a regular social larp for about an hour, we switched to the tabletop mode (for the first time since Elysium 4 ) for some cross-media gaming, and for the last hour of the game we played an investigation and a big battle as tabletop - though transparently using the same rules. 9 players (playing Camarilla vampires) vs 20 weaker Sabbat showelheads - it took about an hour to play out due to the turn-...

Starting this article took me a while. That is because this larp caused me quite a bit of recovery time. It was amazing, incredible and blew my own expectations. On the other hand, there were some issues and parts of it were quite draining. But I'm getting ahead of myself - let me explain from the beginning. So. Camarilla Agram, our Vampire: the Masquerade chronicle. The first and second big event that we did had 25 players in the game. This larp had almost twice that number - 48. Forty-eight. Camarilla Agram is a walk-in larp, but to be honest I was not prepared for that number of people. I expected there to be about 10 fewer. This made it the largest larp I ran since Izgon 2 , and playing conditions were a bit cramped. Tremere clan of Vienna (two guys in the back) and Zagreb Out of those players, seven were visitors from abroad. A month ago, I met some Hungarian and Austrian Vampire players on PoRtaL2 convention in Budapest , and discussed some international storyli...

If you noticed this blog got a bit more active lately, it's because... well, everything's got a bit more active lately. Last evening was Elysium 8 - last Vampire larp for the month. 17 players took part in it - despite the fact most have already reached the XP cap for the month, and only 2 players got any XP from it. It was a nice social event which I forgot to take a photo of - but imagine a lot of people sitting in a bar as in other Elysium larps and that would be it :) The Elysium schedule for April has been published. Elysium 9 is on Tuesday, April 1st. Then it will be every 8 days, to fulfill the April schedule - so Elysium 10 will be on Wednesday, April 9th, Elysium 11 will be on Thursday, April 17th, and Elysium 12 will be on Friday, April 25th. Yeah, that will be the first Friday Elysium . So that would bring April to four Elysium events... plus a major Camarilla Agram event on April 12th. Five Vampire larps, just as it was this month :) But this month...