Diary of a Croatian larper

  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...

Just got it in the mail - Game Wrap 3, published by New England Interactive Literature. In it, you'll find my article on the history and current status of Croatian larp scene (accurate as of August 2018) and my larp Arrival at Tau Ceti, alongside articles and larps of other talented authors - give them a read, it's worth it :) You can buy the print version - or simply read it online or download pdf for free, as everything is published under Creative Commons BY-SA - on this website: https://gamewrap.interactiveliterature.org/vol3/ Hereby, I'd love to express big thanks to the staff of Game Wrap and NEIL, especially Adina Schreiber, as without her none of this would have happened, as well as Viktoriya Fuzaylova and Phoebe Roberts for their fantastic and thorough editing work.

The Family Andersson is a Swedish chamber larp written by Åke Nolemo and Johan Röklander. I played a run yesterday in Zagreb, Croatia, organized by Miroslav Wranka (aka Siro), based on English translation by Tor Kjetil Edland and Håken Lied. This was the larp's third run in Croatia, but first one in Zagreb - it was run in the cities of Rijeka and Osijek before that, as part of the "Larp day" events which presented several chamber larps to the general public. Zagreb has yet to receive a similar event - this was a separate run, under the renewed SRP . The Family Andersson is a modern-era family drama for 8-10 people, which deals with family inheritance distribution (as well as some Christmas plans) between the siblings. This is a simple premise, however there's a twist - the number of characters is half that of the players, and each character is played by two players in a tag-team sort of way - the players switch and alternatively play the same character. Every...

Yes, I took one of them Facebook challenges today: I, Ivan, promise to make a small work of art for the first 5 people who comment "I'm in!" on this post. A 'like' alone is not enough. In turn, you must post this as your status update and make something for the first 5 people who comment "I'm in!" on your status. No post? No art! RULES  • It has to be an original work—made by you—and the recipient must receive it before the end of 2014. • It can be anything: a drawing, photo, video, a piece of music, a bit of writing, a conceptual work or anything in between. So to the people who responded to me, I wrote five short chamber larp scenarios, one for each of them. Four of them are in Croatian, one is in English. They heavily rely on the Ball of Yarn method for character generation and replayability. You can get them here . If you're gonna play some of them, let me know how it went!

Players using the Ball of Yarn method to define relationships between their characters The idea of a Star Trek larp has been popping on and off for about a decade. Every time someone started even thinking about developing it, they immediately thought about everything that Star Trek is, and tried to conceive a fully larp-simulated Star Trek universe. Such attempts then folded because the amount of work to do that would be immense, and results unsatisfactory. But when my sister-in-law - who would end up playing the Doctor in the first run - told me how great it would be to have a Star Trek larp, I immediately said I'd do it. However, I took the minimalist approach instead, and focused on one event in which most of this would not be needed. It would be a chamber one-shot larp (influenced by freeform games) about an away team stranded in a cave. Making it feel like an actual episode of Star Trek was important, so several decisions were made: it would follow the established ...