I was back in Zagreb to run Triumph, and I did something momentous. I bought a box of cereal. This is a big deal. It’s literally the first box of cereal I’ve bought since I started traveling.¹

My eating habits have always been kind of disordered. I almost always have dinner, and it’s usually pretty big. But I’m generally not hungry at breakfast or even at lunchtime, so I’ll either eat one or the other. If I’m staying at a hotel that offers a free breakfast I’ll eat a large breakfast — eggs, toast, corn flakes, danish, orange juice² — and skip lunch entirely. If not I’ll skip breakfast and go out to grab lunch. Sometimes I’ll work straight through both and end up starving at 4pm. Sometimes I’ll be running around and end up snacking on street food all day.

Zagreb was the first place I was actually in one place for more than 14 days while traveling,³ And since I was going to be useless at anything except preparing for Triumph, I just rented out an AirBnB in the city center and holed up for the three weeks before the game. I was fine running out for a slice of pizza or a salad or a poke bowl for lunch, but I knew if I relied on that I’d be inconsistent about it.⁴

So I bought a box of breakfast cereal. Two, in fact, because I was here long enough to mostly get through them both.⁵ They’re not the best breakfast in the world but they mean at least my blood sugar isn’t going to flatline during the day, even if I do skip lunch. This may be at best a marginal improvement in self-care, but it still counts as an improvement.

I’ve visited Zagreb a lot, especially in the past year. I’ve been trying to figure out what I like about it. Certainly the Dalmatian coast is more historic and scenic. And there’s plenty of similarly-sized cities around with the kind of bars and restaurants and pedestrian areas I like. But I think the thing I like is that Croatia is so enthusiastically embracing the European Union.

Croatia is in the process of converting to the euro. That hasn’t happened yet on the street, but the signs are everywhere: menus have prices listed in both kuna and euros and the current exchange rate is posted all over the place. On January 1, 2023 the official currency will switch to the euro, there’ll be a two-week period where both currencies are in circulation to give everyone a chance to spend their outdated money, and then kuna will no longer be legal tender.⁶

In a global moment where everything seems to be fracturing, it’s nice to see a country taking active steps in the opposite direction. I really think the only way we’re going to survive on this planet is through cooperation and collaboration, and that means getting entangled in things like Schengen⁷ and the Eurozone.

And even beyond that, there’s just a whole vibe to the city. It’s not the largest — 750,000 population — but it really became itself at the turn of the 20^th century when Vienna and Budapest did the same, and it’s stuffed with beautiful Art Nouveau buildings. Much of it’s in various states of disrepair; communist governments weren’t exactly known for the preservationist instincts. But it’s there. A friend mentioned it felt like Prague without the tourists or the astronomical clock.

It’s not a place you want to take a vacation.⁸ It’s a place you want to go when you don’t want a vacation, when you want to set down someplace unfamiliar and just kind of be for a weekend or a week. I’m sad I’m leaving, and between my current travel plans and the impending entry into Schengen it’s not at all clear when I’ll be able to be back. We’ll just have to see.

I⁹ first had the idea for a larp inspired by the Hunger Games way back in early 2019. I can’t say it’s an especially original idea — people have been running these sorts of things for years — but what struck me when I was first kicking it around with friends is how wrongheaded a lot of the approaches under discussion were.

People were all wrapped up in the idea of running around the woods with Airsoft guns or foam swords and picking off your enemies one by one. And while that sounds like a great time¹⁰ it also doesn’t sound like a larp to me. It’s hypercompetitive, for one thing. There’s not a lot of people playing to lose on paintball fields. Additionally, it shuts out a whole lot of people from playing right from the start; I wanted to design a larp where you could have the same chance of winning no matter what your eyesight was like or whether you could run a four-minute mile.

In a broader sense focusing exclusively on the fighting misses the point of the story. I’m a fan of the books¹¹ and Suzanne Collins has a lot that’s interesting to say about oppression and resistance and not much that’s interesting to say about battle royale games. It occurred to me very early that if you wanted the experience of playing one of the Tributes in The Hunger Games you’d need to do the rest of it; it’s more about the experience of training beforehand, of being dressed up and paraded around and gawked at, as it is dying senselessly in a gladiatorial pit. That means people playing the mentors and the media and the rulers, and that means creating a game that has enough for them to do separate from the combatants.¹²

I’d also been thinking a lot about player elimination mechanics. I hated how most larps where your characters could die seemed to promise you’d get another character and could just tag back in, like your 1^st level wizard ate it from a random encounter with a cat and you’d just scratched out the name and started again. If you want character deaths to be meaningful it doesn’t work to treat them as disposable. I wanted to know if you told players they were going to die, and gave them the tools to craft a tragic end to their story, would it work? Would people mind if they ended up sitting out six hours on the last day, if it meant they could have that kind of finale?¹³

So I’d been thinking through all of the above and had roughly settled on a design. You have three groups: the Triumphs who were selected to compete in the Triumphal Games, chosen from one of twelve Cantons. Their Mentors, former survivors who were tasked with seeing them through the politics and trying to get one to survive. And the Citizens, people in the Eternal City¹⁴ who were there for one reason or another, whether intrigue, curiosity, or obligation. We had 24 Triumphs, which dictated 12 Mentors, and decided we needed about 30 Citizens to have a viable larp separate from the Triumphal Games themselves.

The first few days would be in the Eternal City. On the last day, we’d take the Triumphs away to an arena, and we’d actually pair them up and have them fight, one-on-one. This would be broadcast on video back to the rest of the players, who could react to it, and be trying to influence events by arranging alliances or sending in supply drops. We’d eliminate the effect of uneven skill levels by simply choosing randomly who faced each other in the arena and who died.¹⁵ We’d also allow players to volunteer; if you had felt like your time was up and this was the tragic end to your story, you could step up in place of whoever got chosen.¹⁶

So that was the idea. And then I randomly ran into a Croatian larper who got really excited over the idea and swore there was a perfect location for it in Croatia. And before I knew it we launched a website, put a deposit on the site, sold a bunch of tickets, and got ready to run the game.

And then 2020 happened.

2020 was a hard year for larp, and 2021 wasn’t any better. We bumped the game by a year, made some tentative efforts to restart before bumping the game yet again to 2022. We plowed through the early half of the year trying to rekindle everything without really being sure we were going to be able to run.

Once it seemed real we managed to refill the larp from our waiting list¹⁷ and started collecting the final payment from people who still owed money. The payment deadline was August 1^st, we hit that and got ready to enter the final push to the event.

Then the drops began. I’ve talked to a lot of organizers, and almost all agree that 2022 has seen a massive uptick in players cancelling at the last minute. And not only in people testing positive for COVID immediately before they travel. For some reason — anxiety? exhaustion? disinterest? — we started losing 2-3 people a week. The excuses were varied. Some couldn’t get time off work, some couldn’t afford to travel, some were simply too stressed out and had to lose something.

This was a bad time. I was busy prepping and running And Then There Were None in August so I couldn’t give it my full attention, and the steady drumbeat of losing players proved incredibly corrosive to the enthusiasm of the organizers. We did our best to bring more paying participants in — it’s entirely possible we could have, if we could have thought of any decent way to advertise beyond Facebook — and we had a little success, but not nearly enough.

The thing which absolutely stuns me is that this all happened after our refund deadline. We had actually suspended our refund policy until mid-2022;¹⁸ after that point the difficulty in finding paying customers meant very few of the people who dropped after that point got their money back.¹⁹ We just couldn’t. It would have blown a 10,000€ hole in our budget.

We eventually brought on board local players on free tickets. I had mixed feeling about this. On the one hand it was giving a lot of local players a chance to play a game they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to; that was great.²⁰ On the other, I was still petrified we were going to see another massive spike in drops hours before the event due to positive COVID tests, and we had been relying on that pool of local larpers in case we needed last minute fill-ins. We did manage to cover all the missing players with locals, but only barely. We were tapped out.

But for some unknown reason, we stopped getting drops in mid-October. One player got COVID on a work trip a week before the game and was still testing positive by the day of. Another player tested positive the day before, but we were able to immediately drop in a replacement. And the day of the game one player never showed up²¹ and was replaced when one of the bus drivers who was transporting people to the hotel said “Hey, this looks fun. What’s going on?”

After all the worry and all the stress, we started the larp down a grand total of one player. And with that, we entered the game.

So how did it go? In a lot of ways, the organizers are the worst people to ask. During the larp you really only hear complaints about how people’s games are getting screwed up or going off the rails or how people are bored or tired or angry. After the larp you really only hear about how great the experience was, as people whose games went sideways leave early or are polite enough to avoid bringing up problems.²² I’d take anything people say about it for at least a week with a grain of salt.

My preliminary impression, however, is it went well. Very well. Lots of players came up to me and said they had a great game. And judging by how active the Discord server is right now with people sharing stories and writing epilogues and thanking each other, a lot of people really did get a lot out of the game.²³

Organizationally, the larp went nearly flawlessly. I can’t speak highly enough of being able to offload your housing and food to a business hotel. People had clean, comfortable rooms with at most a single roommate (and the option to upgrade to a single room). Meals were buffet style and very high quality, with a half-dozen hot dishes and a wide array of cheeses²⁴ and salads and charcuterie and desserts.²⁵ There was a spa with a sauna and steam room.²⁶ Any drinks people bought at the bar could be billed directly to your room and the hotel sorted out payment and handled check out on the final day.

The first two days were a pretty standard larp. We started with a red carpet²⁷ entrance into a gala dinner, thrusting players into a paparazzi photo shoot in front of a media wall with advertiser’s logos all over it, then led them down into a format dinner space. The second day we dipped our toe into the camera setup, with a fixed camera broadcasting the interviews with the MCs throughout the hotel.²⁸ I had only asked for a couple cameras set up to make it seem like the interviews were being broadcast, but we got the whole streaming setup running early and were able to show them within the hotel.²⁹ And that day ended with an informal masquerade party, which seemed like just the kind of insulting, insensitive event the Citizens would host for the Triumphs on the last day they’d be alive.³⁰

The final day was the scary part. That’s when we brought the competitors into the Arena, and prepared for eight hours of eliminations. I’d been repeatedly told this was a terrible idea, that larp doesn’t video well, that it looks boring and cheap and doesn’t capture the magic of the event. And I suppose that’s absolutely true, if you’ve got amateurs running around in crappy lighting with a camcorder. But we put a lot of effort into making it interesting. We set up three cameras and cut between them to add a sense of drama to events. We had the MCs narrate the audience into and out of the scenes to help orient the audience. We had a dry run of every scene so the players knew where they needed to stand and how to pace the action. And we had decent lighting and a smoke machine to help hide the backgrounds.

The result was astounding. I worried that the players wouldn’t be able to get into their character between the practicing and the studio lights; it wasn’t an issue. I worried watching the combats would be boring for everyone in the room; instead it was riveting.³¹ As soon as we went on the air you could hear a pin drop, and the players in the scene would play out a combat or a poisoning or a suicide narrated by our unnervingly cheerful MCs. And as soon as we yelled “cut” the room would absolutely erupt in applause and the latest victim would be surrounded by people offering support and hugs.³²

The video playing throughout the hotel turned out to be equally compelling. People would run to the televisions whenever our “breaking news” theme would play. We had problems with pacing, but it was that there were too few video segments playing, not too many.³³ Most people didn’t want to miss a single twist or turn, like it was a particularly addictive soap opera. And maybe some players were just acting that way for their character, but it sure felt like a lot of people were fully invested.

I haven’t watched the stream since the game so I don’t know how it holds up outside the context of the larp, if you haven’t been inhabiting these characters for 36 hours already. And I don’t want to suggest we got everything right; we made a huge number of mistakes. Nobody thought to pack body mics and we simply didn’t have decent sound coming from the wide shots.³⁴ As I mentioned, the pacing was awful. And the vague plans we had for how the Gamekeepers would function completely fell apart, much to the detriment of their larp.³⁵ But when those cameras were rolling, it was electric. It felt like we had done the impossible. It felt like we had bottled lightning.

Obviously, my opinion doesn’t really matter. I’m far more interested how the players feel about it all, if they felt the setting worked, if the characters were compelling and interesting, if the video segments added or detracted from their experience. We’ll know more when we circulate a larp survey in a week or so. I know some people didn’t have a great larp, for one reason or another.³⁶ And as a first run a lot of design issues shook out: underwritten relationships, unclear expectations, calibration concerns. The organizing team spent hours talking about what worked and what didn’t and how to fix it if we were going to do a rerun.³⁷

And let’s be fair, we had a tailwind. This was a game which took three years to run. Everyone wanted it to be a good game. We had a great set of players, people brought ridiculous over-the-top costumes³⁸ and really dug into their characters, a couple key roles had miracle castings,³⁹ and the enthusiasm levels were off the charts. There’s also that fabled first-run magic, where the excitement of being part of something new and different does something to the game that proves impossible to recapture on subsequent runs.⁴⁰

But this was my first serious, large-scale, blockbuster larp. It took two years longer than it should have. But the players seemed to have a great time, the budget is very nearly balanced, and the organizing team is still on speaking terms. It’s hard to see it all as anything but a win.

Next: Tarifa to Tangier
Prev: Lisbon (LIS) to Zagreb (ZAG)

Footnotes

¹ Honestly, I didn’t buy cereal since before I started traveling, either. It’s certainly not the first box of cereal I’ve ever bought — surely I made a batch of Chex Mix for a party at some point — but I can’t remember what that would have been.

² There’s a lot of nasty petrochemical tasting orange juice out there, but it’s often the only option.

³ I don’t count the year of COVID lockdowns, because I wasn’t traveling. I was mostly living on nutrition shakes and prepared meals and keeping my calorie count ridiculously low, so it’s not exactly typical.

⁴ I’ve learned when I do this I need to lay in a supply of chocolate bars and other snacks because sometimes I’m just not able to force myself to go out, no matter how good I know that is for my mental health.

⁵ They are, in fact, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Cookie Crisp, because I am not great at being an adult. I’ve never had either before.

⁶ They’re giving people until 2026 to exchange coins at banks and, in theory, an infinite amount of time to exchange banknotes. So I guess if your grandparents buried bundles of cash in their backyard in case the communists returned, you’ll be fine.

⁷ Which Croatia has cleared the final bar for, and may be entering sooner than expected. I’ll be a little sad, since it cuts down on the time I can spend here, but it’s a positive step for the country.

⁸ That’s Split and Dubrovnik.

⁹ I’m going to be talking a lot about my design and my intentions and my experience running Triumph, so I need to be absolutely clear this was a group effort by a great team, all of whom were as integral to its success as I was. I can take credit for the initial idea, the budget management, the scoreboard which ran during the Games, and the bull-headedness to push it through to completion. But I didn’t write the characters or order the scenic elements, I didn’t write the safety policy or staff the safe room, I didn’t corral the volunteers or set up the lighting rigs or mix the video or rent the minivans. I didn’t run Discord or the mailing list. The whole last day had ⅔ of the organizing team stuck in the Arena for eight hours trying to keep everything held together. Do not let me give you impression I was responsible for more than a modest portion of the whole shebang.

¹⁰ At least, it would if I were in better shape with two working knees and a modicum of hand-eye coordination.

¹¹ Not so much the movies, but that’s a different discussion.

¹² I honestly thought the mentors were going to be the hot ticket — there were only 12, out of 65 characters — followed by the Triumphs and then all the other characters. If anything, demand seemed pretty well balanced. Never discount an excuse for larpers to dress up in ridiculous costumes, I guess.

¹³ In the actual event we cheated, of course. We did have a few odd characters sitting around if people wanted them. We also encouraged players, after their character died, to seek out characters they had relationships with for a final scene, to try and help provide closure for their stories. And we picked a very nice hotel with a spa and comfortable rooms to relax in.

¹⁴ Our capital city

¹⁵ There were a few ways to influence the random draws. If you were on a team you had less of a chance of being chosen — there’s safety in numbers — and if you could arrange a weapon or supply drop you’d have a slightly better chance of surviving a combat. But by and large they were completely random.

¹⁶ Essentially what I was trying to do was to take a competitive game and turn it into a cooperative larp. I wanted the feel and appearance of ruthless elimination, but underneath I wanted a base of mutual help and support.

¹⁷ We had lost a modest amount of players over the many months of lockdown.

¹⁸ I wasn’t going to tell people in the middle of all the lockdowns that they couldn’t have their money back, especially since so many people were thrown out of work and really needed it. Up until mid-2022, if you asked, we were offering a 100% refund minus our administration fee, no questions asked.

¹⁹ One thing I discovered, running a larp, is why so many larps have such draconian refund policies. It’s because they have to. The closer to the game you offer refunds the more likely you’ll have a run on refund requests that bankrupts your game. Generous refund policies lead to players who are only half committed putting their money down and then deciding how serious they are closer to the payment deadline, leading to a lot of scrambling to refill players. And while most players are understanding, you’ll get a few who get aggressive or argumentative because they want their money back. Having a simple “NO REFUNDS” shuts down a lot of special pleading.

I absolutely promise we wanted to refund every single person who had to drop. Despite what many people seem to think, we aren’t running games as a cunning scam. We barely broke even on this event, and that’s only by counting the hundreds of hours of unpaid labor we all put in.

²⁰ In effect, everyone who dropped late generously subsidized the attendance of a Croatian larper, and for that we thank you.

²¹ It turned out they had to work and just neglected to email us.

²² There are exceptions, obviously. If a game went really badly off the rails you’ll likely hear griping about it, or notice the afterparty feels more like a funeral. And I’ve never been particularly known for tact. But in general.

²³ You always want to create a safe, supportive space in a larp to enable meaningful and emotional play for players. It’s hard to be vulnerable when you don’t trust your coplayers. And I don’t know what we did to deserve this bunch of players, but the group we got were absolutely next level in the amount of care and support they gave each other. People were checking in on one another, stepping off game to calibrate and jumping right back in, making sure everyone was hydrated and rested and not overextended.

We noticed it. Players noticed it. We’d love to take credit for creating it — we certainly tried to foster it — but it was almost entirely the players. It had to be. They were the ones who had to put in the work.

²⁴ Including several kinds of vegan cheese, which shows a depth of commitment to cater to vegetarians, even if I was a bit tired of buckwheat by the final day.

²⁵ I am not kidding when I say the biggest complaint about the food — and I had multiple people bring this up — was that it was too good and there was too much of it. People were overeating and feeling bloated.

²⁶ Although to my horror the pool and jacuzzi were drained when we arrived — apparently some German tourists dropped something into the pipes and it destroyed them — and they never got fixed while we were there. The players kindly never complained, I suspect because I never stopped bitterly bringing them up.

²⁷ Did you know you can buy a four meter length of red carpet for 26€ in Croatia?

²⁸ Hooking into the hotel video feed was surprisingly easy — all we needed was a computer with an HDMI output sitting in the server room. I had written a scoreboard which ran as a webpage and looped through the currently living competitors, the active teams, and a set of corporate logos of the sponsors.

For the live video, we ended up doing the weird but effective trick of streaming the video to YouTube and then playing the YouTube video in the server room. Felt super weird, but it worked surprisingly well.

²⁹ You know that thing when you get tired and run back to your room to relax for an hour? Imagine during that and being able to turn on your television and keep up with what’s happening in game.

³⁰ Really, at first glance the whole idea for The Hunger Games is the kind of ridiculous premise that never made a lick of sense but works really well as a dystopian sci-fi concept. And then you start designing a larp based on it, and you look into the psychological aftereffects reality TV shows have on their participants and the studies on chronic traumatic encephalopathy in college football players, and it somehow doesn’t seem nearly as far-fetched.

³¹ Waiting around for the shots to happen was boring. The actual shooting? Completely engrossing.

³² We had stationed a safety person in the Arena, on the entirely reasonable assumption that people playing out their death scenes might need some emotional support. This turned out to be ridiculously unnecessary. I’ve never seen a group of players offered so much love and support after playing a difficult scene.

³³ I had assumed we’d want a death to play out about every 20 minutes, and then you want to give a lot of space so the Eternal City could react to it. It turns out you probably want them every 15 minutes, and a lot of small filler videos — interviews with sponsors, supply drops, messages of support from home — besides. We’ve kicked around some ideas.

³⁴ The MCs had a microphone, so at least they came through clearly.

³⁵ We had intended the Gamekeepers to control access to the supply drops that happened during the Games, but the reality was we needed to be significantly more up front over what they could influence and how it was going to affect things. They’re ostensibly the ones who control all the aspects of the Games but obviously they can’t; the organizers have to make the majority of those decisions. Being clearer about how that’s going to work would have helped immensely. And now that we actually have a idea of what the arena’s like, we can come up with much smarter and more sensible levers of control for the Gamekeepers to pull.

³⁶ Some people ran out of stuff to do on the final day. We did warn them that was a risk, but knowing what we do now I think there are ways of avoiding that.

³⁷ Leading to a lot of people asking when the rerun was going to be. I’ll repeat myself: I have zero interest in leading up an organizing team for a rerun, but I wouldn’t be adverse to helping out if someone else wanted to run with the ball.

I do think when the pictures and video get released there’s going to be a huge uptick in interest. And if some of the players start promoting it with the enthusiasm they’re currently showing in the Discord, that interest could seriously blow up. But the larp community is fickle and I’d be perfectly happy if all we got out of this was a single very good run.

³⁸ One player brought at least three costume changes for the opening dinner alone.

³⁹ The MCs spend literally eight hours in front of the cameras over the last two days. We had thought about having them as NPC roles — and we offered to do what we could to reduce that burden — but both the players we cast were totally up for it. And they absolutely 100% nailed it. They were charming and blithe and shallow and cruel and nearly devoid of any recognizable human emotion except bloodlust any time they were in front of a camera.

My greatest worry, if there ever is a rerun, is that those roles won’t get filled by people who can really fulfill them. They’re key to making a lot of the larp work for everyone.

⁴⁰ The paradox is that subsequent runs are often objectively much better. The organizers are better prepared, characters get rewritten, catering hiccups are solved. But they still don’t live up to the first run, at least in popular memory.