I’ve been to Zagreb before, and it is always nice to return to someplace you’ve been before. Someplace you’ve liked, anyway. I’ve been cross-crossing my path through all the obvious places — London, Berlin, Madrid — and while those are all nice in their own way, they’re all significantly bigger than Zagreb and necessarily feel more impersonal because of it. Zagreb isn’t small, with about 750,000 people, but it’s certainly smaller than those cities. And returning means I know something of the geography; I can look at the AirBnB map and actually understand what all the different locations mean in terms of wandering around the city center and shopping for groceries. I actually feel like a world traveler, and not some schmuck who bought a plane ticket on a whim — which I guess is usually called a tourist.

I’ve taken advantage of the week by not doing anything. I wanted to rest, and coming back to Zagreb means I’ve already done all the tourist things I really wanted to do. So I found a place just off the main pedestrian drag, and kind of holed up for the week. I made it out to a few places in the area, returned to a few restaurants, spent an evening at a pastry shop I appreciated, had a cocktail in a bar I remembered fondly. Otherwise, I stayed in and worked. And I actually had something to work on.

In one of those weird coincidences, having already planned to be here, an actual reason to be came up a couple months ago. I’ve been trying to organize a larp for years now. Several of them, in fact. I’ve got a knack for great concepts¹ but much less of a talent for inspiring a group of people into working together. I’ve had at least five different teams for five different larps fall apart on me² and while I’m getting better and better at managing groups of volunteers it’s mostly only been in the service of getting the orbital rocket to explode further and further into the atmosphere, rather than on the launchpad.

Until now. And, admittedly, things could always go sideways. But I had a killer idea for a game about a year ago, I found someone who was excited about it and had some ideas of where to run it in Croatia, and I managed³ to find a team which so far has been solid. We made a “preannouncement” to gauge interest, and based on that we went on a site visit.

The larp is called Triumph, and it’s inspired by The Hunger Games and Battle Royale and all these dystopian evil-government-makes-everybody-fight-to-the-death stories.⁴ These are popular for larps; I’m surprised nobody’s done anything similar on the kind of scale we’re trying.⁵ I think that’s for a couple reasons. First, most people’s idea for this sort of game involves a bunch of people running around the woods trying to ambush each other. That can be fun, sure, but it’s got limited appeal. Second, it’s no fun to die early, so you need things for players to do.

I think I solved those. Rather than focusing on the combat, the bulk of the game happens before the combat starts. The players are mixed fairly evenly between the competitors, their mentors, and the residents of the capital city. The combat is limited to the final day, so dying early mean you only miss the final bit of the game, not most of it.

I do think this whole debate highlights a particularly common, yet weird, way of thinking about larps. We often think of them like movies — you show up at the start, and play through until the end. Showing up midway through means you’ve missed things, and leaving early means you never know how it turned out. I hate showing up to a movie even five minutes late. I want to see the whole thing.

But many larps aren’t like that. I mean, some are — the designers kick off some main plot right at the start and the players are intended to follow it through to the big confrontation at the end — but lots more don’t work like that at all. You’re telling your story. It starts whenever it starts, and ends whenever it ends. That doesn’t have to be at the same time as anybody else. I’ve often reached a point where I was done with the experience with hours left. I had already told my story. It was pleasant enough waiting for others to tell theirs, but it didn’t really add anything to my experience. I was role-playing an epilogue.

The value of a larp doesn’t lie in how many hours you were in play, any more than the value of a movie rests on how long it is. I’m not worried about characters dying early in Triumph. I am worried about characters having a meaningful death, having a story that reached a meaningful conclusion, about struggling and failing against impossible odds, about finding (or failing to find) some measure of peace amidst all the death. I don’t want people to be bored after that.⁶ But I think my job is to provide them with the tools to have a deeply moving, emotional experience. That’s how I’m measuring success.

So I toured the hotel⁷ and had a nice relaxing day, then went back to Zagreb and had another series of relaxing days, always venturing out at twilight for dinner and sitting in crowds and people-watching. And then I wrote. Background documents and social media posts and rough schedules and invites for people to help and ideas and ideas and ideas and ideas. As I told someone, planning a larp is the worst six months of your life all designed so you can have the best three days of your life.

It’s a lot of work. But we’ve plenty of time yet — it’s still a year off from running — and I’ve got what feels like a solid, engaged group of people to help. There’s still questions to be asked and designs to be nailed down and so, so much writing to do. But we’re moving forward. We’re very close to being able to sell tickets, and it looks very likely that we’ll have at least one run, if not more.

Here’s to achieving escape velocity.

Next: Birmingham (BHX) to Kerry (KIR)
Prev: Dubrovnik (DBZ) to Zagreb (ZAG)

Footnotes

¹ I don’t mind bragging about my design sensibility here, because it turns out it’s the least useful skill when you’re actually trying to accomplish something.

² I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and as far as I can tell it’s not me. At least, not primarily me. I think it’s more the cost of working with all-volunteer teams; people are very easy to get excited about an idea and sign up to help, while it’s much much harder to get people to do things once work turns up.

³ After some last-minute shenanigans

⁴ I wonder why these are popular in the current political moment?

⁵ Although I am playing Countdown soon, which is a larp about a Big-Brother-style reality show in which the contestants are killed off. Certainly adjacent.

⁶ I’m hoping the spa goes some way towards helping with that.

⁷ I am aware, if still weirded out, by the way these things work still. On the basis of a few vague promises me and a co-organizer were invited out, got a tour, a round of drinks, and an extravagant lunch (complete with a nice bottle of wine) completely free. I had wanted to spend the night, just to see how the rooms felt to stay there and to see how the hotel felt at night and in the morning. I suspect I wouldn’t have had to pay for that either.

And if I had another place I was considering, I’d do the same for that one, and then at least one of them certainly wouldn’t be getting my business. I know that’s just assumed to be part of the cost of the industry, but boy does it feel weird.