Diary of a Croatian larper

Lars Andersen is a Danish archer who had undertaken a journey of reviving medieval archery battle techniques. He is also a larper - in fact, that's where he started using bow and arrows, and that's where he was able to get some practice with soft arrows against moving targets. At a fantasy larp. So watch the above video about Lars, narrated by the Danish larper Claus Raasted. It had gone viral in only a few hours. Below you can find his video from 2012: Don't these videos make you want to take archery yourself? :) Discuss in comments. In the meanwhile, here's a few quotes from Lars: ”I recently read about a girl who did Katniss Everdeen (from Hunger Games) cosplay. She'd had to glue the arrows to the inside of the quiver to make sure they didn't bounce out when she ran around. If that doesn't tell us that the back quiver is silly, I don't know what does.” ”Many people have accused me of being fake or have theories on how there's cheatin...

Tomorrow is when the biggest Croatian reenactment / living history event starts, the tournament of Sv. Helena - it's a huge tournament which draws in many medieval groups from Croatia and the surrounding countries, and many visitors too. The attendees will also see great visuals... which sometimes remind me of big German larps, such as Drachenfest and ConQuest. There's just something about that level of organisation, size, visuals and equipment standards which brings back memories, and desire to bring Croatian larp closer to that visual level. Tomorrow is also when I'll do another Hangout by larping.org's The Larp Group. It will start in its usual time, at 5 PM CET, and it will be about love and relationships at larps. If you miss the live stream, you'll be able to see the video on the youtube channel, as usual. Highland games is a larp that will happen tomorrow - in-character highlander and celtic games, with lots of song and partying to boot. It will ...

Aside from larp, reenactment events and carnival are two other places where you can dress up and pretend to be someone else. Of course they differ in whether the costuming part is viewed as serious business or something downright silly. With my reenactment/living history group "Red Srebrnog Zmaja" I participated in the recreation of the final battle of the Croatian-Slovenian peasant revolt, which took place exactly 440 years earlier, on February 9th 1573. While the participants' garb was of limited authenticity to the period, the battle itself was quite spectacular, and from my perspective as a participant quite fun. Here's a video of it: That battle displayed several formations, tactics etc. which I sometimes miss on Croatian fantasy larps (which usually feature small skirmishes instead of big battles), but they remind me of my experience on German larps such as Drachenfest and Mythodea. Speaking of those two larps, my wife and I portrayed NPCs from them thi...

Zelingrad in fog Zelingrad is a ruined medieval fortress-city near Sveti Ivan Zelina. I went there today with Red Srebrnog Zmaja (my reenactment/living history group) to a party organized by Vitezovi Zelingradski (the local group) and for the other living history groups. Intro speech of the party, Slip band in the background. Rightmost is Ivo, organizer of Krvomeđe and Rajski Vrhovi larps, getting ready to play his tin whistle. Most people were in their medieval garb, helping to increase the atmosphere - which was quite good. Very high-profile costuming and props. Which made me think... What's stopping us from equipping our fantasy larps with a similar level of quality gear? I'll leave this unanswered for now. The program included a short review of everything that happened on a living history scene this year. Overall, it was a great party with plenty of interesting people to meet and talk to. And drinks to drink, and meat to grill. I think something like th...

Just under three weeks ago, I did a coverage of SCA Croatia . As I promised in that article, I went to the coastal town of Crikvenica to meet Rebecca. We met at the medieval fair called Dani Frankopana 2012 (Frankopan days - Frankopan were one of the most famous medieval noble families in Croatia), celebrating 600 year anniversary of Crikvenica. I noticed two larger reenactor groups being there, Red Čuvara grada Zagreba and Vitezovi Zelingradski, there was a nice band called Minstrel playing (wearing plenty of clothes, considering the heat they must have gotten cooked alive in there), and some vendors - I've seen some of them, while others were new, and locals sold quite a lot of interesting stuff. I haven't seen much of the program, which is mostly my fault because I came during the noon and blazing heat, but I got myself some nice stuff for larps. I might not have gotten the full picture, but  I'd call the fair itself a rather mediocre, mostly due to most of i...

There's plenty of new things going on in LARP this year. In the first 6 months we already got the first Croatian Green Banner LARP , Robert's feast , and two Steampunk and Terra Nova events ( Intro  and Terra Nova 2012 ), as well as the new larp association . And there's more! However, the newest kid on the block is actually one of the oldest such groups in the world. It's SCA, Society for Creative Anachronism, and its Croatian branch has just started forming. SCA takes the middle ground between medieval reenactment and LARP, although that's a pretty shallow description as not everyone has the same idea of what LARP is, or what reenactment is. Like our fantasy LARPs, it covers a wide time range, it's done primarily for the participants themselves, not as a display to the general public, and it's designed to be fun without a lot of expensive gear. SCA usually offers arts and crafts classes such as (historically accurate) sewing, heraldry, dancing et...