Ongoing Izgon 2. Missed reviews.

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 all players.

I didn't even get a chance to review a Steampunk larp (from "Para pokreće svijet" series - this one was named "Fronti nulla fides") from two and a half weeks ago. It was played in the indoor gym as the last one - but had a typical structure, like when it was played in Eko Selo Žumberak. Or mostly typical. The playtime - 10 PM to 3 AM - was demanding, especially on a weekend before St. Martin's Day, otherwise known as "that day when Croats get shitfaced and there's cops on every corner checking your blood alcohol levels", so few were willing to drive - my car was full. A large number of characters got killed or wounded during the larp. The next one will be styled "Chase", it will be a minilarp off-shot event with only a few participants, taking place on the Medvednica mountain one day when it's gonna be some snow. The name of this event was supposed to come from French instead of English, but it was discovered that the same word is used in both language.

In the meanwhile, I got my Larps from the Factory book! It's soft-cover, and full of awesome nordic larps which I'm gonna run starting next year. I already ran one of the larps - Limbo - and in fact, larp's author asked me for a permission to include the photo in this book, which I of course gave. It was heartwarming to see it in.

I only managed to skim the book so far. The design is nice, and it's readable. However, it will get a lot of use next year. Which reminds me, I'd still need to complete reading of "Nordic Larp" which is also pure awesomeness. You'll get a review when I'm done :) And my reading list keeps getting longer, as Polish larpers just translated their publication from this year's Kola conference (available here for free). They also announced their next conference in January, which sounds like fun!

And that's it for this post! Wish I could tell you more about Izgon 2 and all that's going on. But many people are still playing it so that will have to wait.

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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