Terra Nova: Rise of Rashalan

Terra Nova: Rise of Rashalan - how it was

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 way better and more convincing as the undead than before. The aim of playing the undead convincingly was high, and there were many details that made it happen.

The Fleshcarvers - twisted surgeons, butchers and alchemists of the undead

One of them was a part about creating a workable undead society of sorts. Or better a first taste of how something like that should look like since it was a rather short time for something like that to form successfuly. However, there have been many wild ideas and interesting role-playing encounters - making them a very colorful (and often twisted) bunch of the undead, divided into several different castes of the newlyformed undead society. The internal hierarchy and structure worked well.

Opposing the undead was the Imperial Legion, dressed in red and blue colors for visual uniformity. The Legion portrayed what is usually the NPC role on the event - they were a weaker force of the two, and there primarily to challenge the undead, give them someone to terrorize and provide them with fresh new recruits.

Of course, this led into some battles. Here's how they went.

In the first battle, the Undead attacked strongly, took two soldiers and turned them into undead

In the second battle, the Undead were pushed back, and there was a brief moment of respite as wounds were tended

A planted ritual ended up badly and hurt the defenders

Legion assaulted the fortress, which ultimately proved fatal
Here's a duel between king Yngvar and the captain of the Legion (played by me)

In the end, only a few survivors remained on the side of the living - and none sane who could tell the tale. The event ended, and we ended up debriefing in the nearby bar, a lot of people still in their makeup.

All in all, it was a good fun - and a great learning experience. Not nearly as pretentious or artsy as I sometimes do stuff - however, sometimes it's purely fun to run around and battle your enemies for one Sunday afternoon. Besides, this time it was the turn on the undead to really shine. One way or another, Rise of Rashalan will remain an unique event in the series, and the next big Terra Nova is Terra Nova 2014 in May, in its' standard multi-day format and with regular characters.

You can see more Rise of Rashalan photos here.

The 15 rules of larp

The following 15 rules (warning: strong language) were written some years ago in Great Britain, and have been pretty much generally accepted on the British larp scene. Especially popular is rule 7 - widely known by its number and commonly considered to be the most imortant rule of all (and I agree). Even the biggest British larp forum has taken Rule7 as its name. The rules have been originally created by the Drunken Monkeys and edited by Rick Wynne who added some extra stuff in the explanations to make them more understandable to international audience (it still contains some British larp lingo though), more work-safe and to throw in his two cents. (copy of the original wording is available here ) 1. Don’t play a mighty warrior; play a warrior and be mighty. Don’t label your character. As soon as you say that you are the best swordsman in the land someone will come along and kick your ass. Just get into the mindset of the person and role-play it out. 2. No one cares about you...

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...

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...

Diary of a Croatian larper

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