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...

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...

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.

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 ...

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...

Last update on this blog was three and a half months ago. Plenty of things happened in that time, which I didn't write about. Not because there was nothing to write about, but because what I could write about them wouldn't merit a full article. So let's do a quick summary. Photo by ConQuest photo team First of all - ConQuest 2017. World's largest larp. It was a great experience, but you probably know most about it if you read my previous ConQuest articles (I didn't get to Drachenfest this year either, but one of the main topic on ConQuest was about the ridiculous amount of rain and mud they had to deal with the week before on Drachenfest). To make it short - the story returned to Mythodea again, and we - as bad guys - had a really nice fortress which we manned and defended (and assaulted in the big final battle when it was taken from us). The camps were organized in a different manner - similar to how they used to be back in 2012 and 2013 . There were a few ...