Diary of a Croatian larper

And so, another year ends. But in the last day of 2013 we got a new surprize: the book from the Wyrd Con 2013, a free online publication which you can get here . It's a 136 page PDF which you should definetely get and read. Unlike Knutepunkt books which often feature bleeding edge new academic content, Wyrd Con book has more stuff which is more relatable to our own situation, and several articles really felt like they were needed. The book content is not so much about bleeding edge stuff - it's about improving the basics, and that's what makes it so valuable. The first article by David B. Williams is about level gaps, permanent character death and linear plot (yay, I'm quoted in it! BTW, we also discussed death on forum ). The second article is about transparency and safety by Evan Torner, and I'd pair it with the article about physicality by Elin Dalstål.  With a large number of new larps and new ideas popping up in Croatia, I'd say these three are a must...

Happy Holidays from Crolarper! This painting is a Tremere art done by one of our talented players, Kristina. Hope you like it :) The next two larps in Croatia will both take place on January 5th - the special "Steampunk: Para pokreće svijet" event "Chase" and Krvomeđe battlegame event . Also, the start of the Camarilla Agram chronicle has been announced for January 25th - it will be run at my place. The dates for Rajski Vrhovi events in 2014 have also been announced . The latest project on the forum is that we started to compile local larp terminology. See the current list here and add to it if you have something to add. We're discussing other interesting topics such as morality in Croatian larp , how to build larp weapons and showing off our characters . Join us there. And have a happy holiday season with your family and friends!

Dear readers! Diary of a Croatian larper is now getting its' own forum - Forum of a Croatian larper , available at http://forum.crolarper.com  (and through the forum link on top of this blog). Besides being the official forum of this blog, it's also a place to discuss anything larp-related. If you're reading this, and you're willing to participate in the discussions - politely and with respect to other players regardless of their playstyle - than you're welcome to participate, join in the discussion and share your knowledge and expertise. The forum is bilingual, English and Croatian. The "Event announcements" board is mostly focused on region (Croatia and nearby countries), but other boards are pretty much open for all forms of discussion. Rules, techniques, crafting info, creative stuff, a marketplace board for players to trade stuff, a board about related hobbies... And of course, discussions about the articles published here, to supplement the comme...

Available on DriveThruRPG Reviewing a book as complex as this one is a monumental task. It was published 3 days ago, and it's got a monumental 550 pages of content - luckily, a large part of it was familiar to me from "slices" they released before they published the book, and little has changed there. However, rules is relatively small part of this. The book is loaded with art, stories, tips, setting lore and more. This is a review of the book as a whole, and there's much more in it than rules. But let's start at the beginning. Vampire the Masquerade larps have started all the way back in 1993 with the release of the first Mind's Eye Theatre, as a rework of the tabletop RPG published by the White Wolf Publishing (tabletop was published in 1991). The idea was to provide players with a way to play tabletop-like stuff in live format. Basically, like with tabletop, you buy the rulebook and run the game with your friends. And it worked really well - despite t...

OzOI is the plot team which runs Ognjeni Mač's events, elected for one-year terms - they write the plot for the entire year, and play the majority of key NPCs on an event. The position was established in 2011. At the moment of writing there's a lack of candidates for next year's OzOI and it's unclear if Ognjeni Mač's plot structure will remain the same or if it will change in some way, and there are some changes currently ongoing there, but it's almost the time for them to pass the organizers' duties to other people. The 2012's OzOI was interviewed just under a year ago when their term was over. Many of the questions I asked them were already answered by the 2013's OzOI during their candidature interview  and you can read them there. Here's a new series of questions, answered by Tijana Migić and Ines Josić, two out of three members of this year's OzOI. The series is very much focused on their experience as the organizers - and sort o...

This Sunday's Vampire: The Masquerade larp - the last one in the Embrace the Night series - was quite different than the previous two events. Which is sort of obvious, as each one of them was at a different location, and had a different main organizer. 10 players showed up, and made Embrace the Night 3 atmosphere the one of a rather tight meeting. After it was finished, we gathered in the nearby Zlatni Medo beer hall for some drinks. The full version of rules has now also been released (PDF only until mid January), and it's available here . I got it, I like it so far, and I'll be reviewing it when I get the time to go through it. We have also discussed future plans for the Camarilla Agram chronicle. The intro is now complete, and next year the full chronicle starts. The setting style document is available  here , and the planned schedule for 2014 is here . Eight big events, spaced month and a half apart - but that's not all. In February, there will be...

It is December. The days are getting shorter. Nights are starting earlier, and last for longer. It's time to finally embrace the night. The third and the final event of Embrace the Night is going to be played tomorrow evening. Embrace the Night is the three-part intro vampire larp chronicle, which will continue in the next year's full-blown Camarilla Agram series. Tomorrow's larp will be run by Goran Bjelić. Like all larps in Embrace the Night series, it will be fairly different from the other events in the series - which is due to different GMs, different structure and pacing, different locations and trying out different stuff. It will be the last piece in the puzzle that will eventually create the next year's series. The full By Night Studios ruleset will be out soon - in about two weeks. You can still preorder it . The layers of complexity of the regular Vampire society are setting in, being revealed slowly through the intro chronicle, and tomorrow's the ...

Drawing by Danijel Knežević, depicting all factions and their in-character relations Reviewing your own larps is always different than reviewing others. However, even amongst those, Izgon 2 is different. It's a pervasive larp played in real space which was probably the most ambitious larp that I've ever done, the larp I've spent longest time building - and I was excited about it. Over two months have been spent preparing this larp - handling the sign-ups, writing the rules and mapping and writing the characters themselves. That is on top of all the work done on the first Izgon larp - my review and design document from the first larp is available  here . All the info from it is still valid. The larp documentation is available here , and you may use rules and character info to get better references to what is told here. The sheer scale of this larp - not just the number of players (which is nothing unusual outside Croatia) - but the fact it was played in a large number o...

Players using the Ball of Yarn method to define relationships between their characters The idea of a Star Trek larp has been popping on and off for about a decade. Every time someone started even thinking about developing it, they immediately thought about everything that Star Trek is, and tried to conceive a fully larp-simulated Star Trek universe. Such attempts then folded because the amount of work to do that would be immense, and results unsatisfactory. But when my sister-in-law - who would end up playing the Doctor in the first run - told me how great it would be to have a Star Trek larp, I immediately said I'd do it. However, I took the minimalist approach instead, and focused on one event in which most of this would not be needed. It would be a chamber one-shot larp (influenced by freeform games) about an away team stranded in a cave. Making it feel like an actual episode of Star Trek was important, so several decisions were made: it would follow the established ...

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...