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Steampunk picks up the steam again

After taking a 2.5 year break, the Croatian Steampunk larp Para pokreće svijet  (translation: Steam makes the world go round ) is back. And it's grown into something more, as nowadays it's having the honor of being the longest-running active larp campaign in Croatia (and likely the last one still standing). Long-time readers of this blog might remember when I wrote about first event being announced back in early 2012. Few things have changed since then. Fairly lightweight rules which were once in place (and often ignored in favor of improvisation) were dropped, and some other logistical complexities were lost over the years. However, this is still a larp that is fairly lightweight in its themes, not too serious, and about everyone having a fun time together. September last year saw the first of new events - Back to the future . Also a fairly significant one, since it involved some time-travel shenanigans, and basically reset the 10 years of story and in-character political sch...
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Discord is up

More stuff from my PoRtaL XII talk,  Larps and Information Technology , seem to be coming true. In particular, the part about technology becoming old. And so it is with this blog. The technology it's built on is getting old and starts to not play as nice with modern browsers, plugins and smartphones as it used to. Specifically, the comment section doesn't seem to work for anyone. So I decided to open a discord to help us all connect in an easier way. If you are interested, join the Crolarper discord server here .
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It's been way too long without any updates

  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...
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From PoRtaL to PoRtaL

The PoRtaL conference had truly gone international. After the first year it had gone to Hungary. It switched between Budapest and Zagreb several times, until it went to Plovdiv, Bulgaria in 2018. I skipped the seventh, which was in Kyiv, Ukraine as I could not have made the journey at the time. I was on the eighth one - in Zagreb, in March of 2020., subtitled "Infinite play" and ran by Terrible Creations. PoRtaL 8, pre-pandemic To say it was great would be seriously underselling it. It was very diverse, with a lot of friends, new faces, and some big names in international larp. I might have fanboyed a little too hard over finally meeting  (and playing with) Mike Pohjola whom I interviewed on this blog all the way back in 2012. Great talks, larps in the evening, and hanging out in general. During the event, I promised to write about it on this blog but (until now) I never did. The week after PoRtaL 8, everything changed and the world turned to a living nightmare due to the pan...
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Game Wrap 3

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.
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PoRtaL VI - a visit to the Bulgarian larp community

Yesterday I returned from PoRtaL VI, and it was amazing. In case you're unfamiliar with PoRtaL, it's been the regional larp conference for the past few years. First one was organized in Zagreb, Croatia, and until this one it's been switching between Zagreb and Budapest, Hungary until this year, as our larping communities made a majority there. The Hungarian participation has been sorely missed lately (seriously, we miss you guys). So far the Bulgarian larp community maintained a small, but constant presence during PoRtaL conventions, and this year's PoRtaL VI was something new, as it was held in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Four people from Croatia went there - myself, and members of Terrible Creations team, Matija, Siro and Vatra sat in a car and made a 12 hour road trip through Serbia, and into Bulgaria (or to be accurate, 3 of us went into the car - Vatra went by plane some time later, but returned with us). We reached Plovdiv on Thursday evening, hitting some bars and ...
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TESC IV: Ebonheart review

TESC is a Croatian Elder Scrolls-inspired larp, started by Marko Zadro and ran by him and his team for more than 4 years so far. During its first two years of existence, four larps were ran (the second was the one actually counted as first, as first larp was counted as playtest) which were well-received, well-visited and raised the visual level of Croatian fantasy larps. Yet TESC IV: Ebonheart was a whole different beast altogether. General ideas were formed by organizers far before the logistics to do them became available, and 2.5 years elapsed between the previous larp of the series and this one. Also, this is the first larp so far directly inspired by the organizer's (and mine) favorite game of the series, Morrowind. Inspired by the European blockbuster castle larps, TESC IV became the first Croatian blockbuster castle larp - although at the far lower entrance price (€85 as opposed to €500+ price typical of those). While this means production values weren't exact...
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