Diary of a Croatian larper

Or at least this year's Croatian LARP season is. Even though the actual year ends in two weeks, no LARPs have been scheduled for the remainder of the year. After today, that is. Because today is Maksimir 53, which has the honor of being the last event of the year. Perhaps it manages to wrap up its tiny story arc which started on Maksimir 51? We'll see. Most other LARPs wrapped up their stories as much as they could. Which gave this year the feeling of being somehow complete. With most large and midsize LARPs ever to be organized in Croatia, old ideas which were finally made to work, and plenty of new ideas and creativity we have seen. We made awesome connections with LARPers from other countries - Slovenia, Serbia and USA primarily, but also players from Bulgaria (who by the way have a new site ), Germany, UK, Denmark, etc. It was a wild ride, sometimes bumpy, but overall we have truly created something here this LARP season, something that's hopefully going to last...

Petra Sabljar, who runs LARP Hrvatska blog , did an awesome interview with Claus Raasted, a high profile Danish LARPer. As you might or might not be aware of, Denmark pretty much equals paradise if you're a LARPer, as it's the only country in the world where LARP not only comes close to football in popularity, but actually beats it, with the number of active LARPers being somewhere in the six-figure range. (!!!) While the interview published on LARP Hrvatska blog is in Croatian, with Petra's kind permission (thanks again!) I'm re-posting her interview here, but this time in English - unedited, and in the form it was originally conducted in (which is a good thing, as my knowledge of Danish is limited to several years of unsuccessfuly trying to properly pronounce "rødgrød med fløde" - if you don't know what I'm talking about just youtube it). Anyway, apart from the nice coverage of Danish LARP, the observant among you might glimpse some stuff about C...

As I'm writing this, I just came back from the Rajski Vrhovi feast, which lasted from yesterday afternoon until today early in the morning. It was held at Žumberački podrum bar in Budinjak, close to the terrain of Rajski Vrhovi - in fact, the bar is owned by the same people as the terrain. We arrived around 3 PM, a bit late (due to reasons which I'll explain in my next post, so stay tuned) but the feast just started although roleplaying has been already going on for a while. We had lunch immediately, an interesting goulash with polenta. The goulash had some pears in it, so it was definitely something I haven't tried before, but it was great. After that, we had some bardic competition which was won by Melindor and his "Steppe Wolf" song accompanied by ukulele. Congratulations on the win, Melindor! The main quest started then. After someone made a certain ritual, frost elementals started to appear. I was one of them, and since I was a photographer on...

Krvomeđe is definitely getting bigger and better every month now. This Sunday we were blessed with great weather - it went up to 16 degrees Celsius. After a long time of temperatures below zero, it felt almost like summer. It was actually warmer than Krvomeđe days in the past two months. It had lots of bridge battlegames like last two times - actually all of them were bridge battlegames this time around. However, it didn't feel like a bother because of several reasons. It started earlier than last two times, giving us enough playtime during that short December daylight. The scene was already set up when the game started, and there was no downtime in the beginning because we did some ditch fighting until everybody got dressed and ready for the game, and then some couple of minutes more until everybody warmed up before we started games - capture the flag and capture the base variants. The last game was particularly interesting. It was CTF with one flag, which was ini...

On November 26th - 27th there was a LARP in Crkvari near Orahovica, organized by Gaia - so the storyline was related to this years' Utvrda Svjetlosti . We were in a privately owned house which was a bit cramped - mostly due to a lot more of us from Zagreb showing up on the event than our hosts expected. Once we arrived, changed and explored the outdoor part of the terrain, it was already dusk, so our outdoor time was rather short. Enough to set up a story and make a few introductions. It was mostly a political LARP. But there were some restless ghosts around. And after they were cleansed, there were a couple of werewolves who followed us from the cleansing site, and tried to goad us in an ambush outdoor. Eventually, we defeated them. However, the focus was on in-game politics, as many, many sides went there to arrange treaties (and most of them managed to do so), and there was some high quality roleplaying involved. Besides the house itself and the large terrain in the back, b...