Diary of a Croatian larper

As this blog has gone a bit silent, you might have been wondering what's been going on recently. Well, to be honest a lot of that. There's been so much going on that I barely have enough time to write a post. That's mostly due to running Izgon 2, and there's a lot involved in running it. It has four times the number of people of first Izgon larp (minus a few who burned out and/or whose characters got killed) - and it left me with too little time to even talk to everyone I want to talk to. The only reason I'm writing this article now is that it's gotten a bit slower so I managed to catch some breath. The debriefing, the documentation, the analysis of everything - it's gonna be great. Expect it to start popping up in a few days. The larp officially finishes Sunday at noon - the next Krvomeđe will be almost immediately after, at 1 PM - and the Zagreb debriefing will be held afterwards. However, depending on player actions, it might end sooner for some or al...

This Sunday's Krvomeđe fighting day was a bit desolate - only three of us came, which is sadly not enough for battlegames and not nearly the numbers Krvomeđe can make (it can swing up to 20 people at times). So I'm gonna make a public call to everyone in Zagreb (and Croatia in general) who'd like to do some fighting practice - come next time, join the mailing list to be informed when the next game's gonna be and ask any questions you might have. A lot of Croatian larpers could use some fighting training - this is a perfect opportunity. Now that's out of the way - this Saturday there's gonna be another Steampunk larp from the "Para pokreće svijet" series. Due to location issues, it will be once again in the "SPK Fothia" interior climbing gym - however, it will be a social event, not the one focused on climbing. This event will be titled "Fronti nulla fides", and it will be played late at night - from 10 PM to 3 AM. Like a...

Up until recently, it was real simple to separate the two into their own categories - at least in Croatia. Tabletop was played around a table, people were talked through what was going on, and dice were being used to determine a course of action. Larp was when you got into the woods and hit your friends with foam swords. And while tabletop has always been a rich marketplace - perhaps dominated by D&D (Pathfinder, in the last few years) there were always other options - GURPS, World of Darkness, Fudge etc. being some of the most popular. Yet larp started monolithical, and everything different was always met by an angry mob of misunderstanding and screams: "That sucks, that's not a real larp!". I could provide a comprehensive list of all instances where this happened, but it would take approximately half of the article. The only constant is that people regularly disagree what larp is. Let's see a couple of definitions of larp. "Larp is originall...

The last night's Vampire event had been the focus of my organizational efforts for the last week. The main organizer of the last night's event was Ivan Erpačić, and while the event's plot was his, I did a few details on the characters, and worked a bit on the downtime actions and plot between the events as well as plenty organizational questions which arose - actions which took a lot of my time this week. Also, some family matters popped up - which nearly let me unable to go to the event, but in the end I managed to attend, arriving hour and a half late. Your friendly neighborhood Nosferatu Ivan Erpačić was both the main organizer of the second installment, and also our host for the evening The location was great, mood set high due to set dressing which included a lot of candles and blood-like drinks. About 20 players attended the larp, both old players and new faces. I arrived in the middle of the social event - introducing my new character, and talking to a lot of ...

Queen Elli, King Yngvar and Ilsa the Gravecaller Rise of Rashalan was a special event in the Terra Nova series. In many ways it was different from all the past events of the series. It was the first one to take place in a public location (the ruined old city of Susedgrad on the western outskirts of Zagreb), it was the shortest one so far (in-game time lasted for three hours), it was focused on the undead as the main characters, it was mainly a combat larp, and everyone involved played the same characters the entire time - there were no "jumper" NPCs. A photo from this spring's Terra Nova 2013, just to illustrate the differences in costuming and make-up A total of twenty players and two non-playing staffmembers (my wife who was a photographer for the event, and our make-up artist who was busy doing undead makeup) took part in the larp. There was a high visual focus of the event, and besides the make-up a lot of players made their own costumes and props to look ...

Return to Rikon after last year was nice - this year everything seemed more busy and alive, with visibly more people attending than last year. Rikon grew visibly in both visitor number and content. It also ended up being probably the most larpy convention I've been on (apart from PoRtaL , but that one was different because it was a specialized larp convention). There was truly loads of larp content (which I mentioned in the announcement ). All of it means that Rikon was - for me at least - quite a busy convention, so I didn't see much beyond the larp content. In a way, that gives me pause. Looking at the programming schedule , there was an almost full track of larp programming throughout the event, which was truly remarkable. First presentation was an introduction to larp and what larp can be by Siro (M. Wranka) - but I missed it since I was still on the road at that time. Dru five-man group I arrived just in time to run  Dru . Dru is a Norwegian freeform scenari...

One of the most challenging things about running larps is keeping all the information you have in a way that is quickly accessible, reliable and easily manageable. Technology makes that much much easier. In this post, I'll mostly talk about the solutions that I use myself. Most of my needs are met by Google Drive. Here's a screenshot from my phone, showing part of my folder structure: Since I carry my phone with me, in a few moments I can bring up anyone's character sheet, attendance records, background story, check their waiver status etc. no matter where I am. Most of the important stuff is editable, and since Google Drive allows for collaboration, the document might be edited by someone else too - and I'll automatically see the changes. Here's an example of one of the documents - the beginning of my character sheet from this autumn's Demgard  (which got an in-character epilogue in the meanwhile), editable by both me and GM. The character she...