My LARPs are often experiments in the sense that I don’t always know how something will actually work in play. This one was quite the experiment, and honestly, I was worried it might turn out super boring. It’s easy when my LARPs have tons of tasks and tangled relationships—but in this one, players only brought their own stories.
In Bizzaro LARP, each player could play a character from any other LARP they had ever played—or were playing—or create any kind of brand-new character. There were no limits on powers, weapons, species… anything.
The rules fit on less than a single A4 sheet of paper.
The basic premise: players suddenly find themselves in an unfamiliar, enclosed space (each arriving from their own situation—some even believe they’ve died) and a strange membrane prevents anyone from leaving.
In the photo, you can see a bunch of people who later became some of my closest friends—but also some who eventually drifted away, even after a lot of shared LARPing.
Something kind of bizarre sticks out when I think back on it: the guy in the light green “costume”—who do you think he was playing? Wrong. Not a surgeon. He was playing Robin Hood.
He asked me if I had a feather for his hat. I said no, but I’d get him one.
So, I went to Lake Jarun, where I knew there were a lot of crows and often plenty of feathers under the trees. I figured I’d paint one red and it would look great. But!
No feathers. No crows. Just one dead crow on the grass near the path.
And I thought: well, I promised him a feather, so I guess I’ll take one. Turns out, pulling a feather out of a dead crow’s wing isn’t exactly a five-second job.
So there I was, tugging on this crow corpse, when a family with three kids walked by. The little girl asked her mom, “Mom, what’s that man doing with the dead animal?”
Mom: “I don’t know. Don’t look, let’s go.”
Anyway, I got the feather. But he never used it.
The bow he made for himself was a 20 cm bent twig with a blue rubber band. And the rest of the costume—you can see for yourself.
Sometimes the problem with bad costumes isn’t money—it’s ultra laziness.
If you’ve read my previous texts, you might notice I’ve worn the same outfit three times already: once as a Greek warrior, once as an alien, and here again—as an Alavite.
Not sure what was that.
I honestly have no idea how most of the in-game conversations went—I never even asked the others. But mine were good.
How does a conversation flow between a doctor of paraphysics from 1902 (Danijel Štriga) and a sports star (Zvonimir Barać) from the year 2301?
Or between a druid fairy (Ivana Delač) and a nurse (Anita Sakar)?
If there’s ever a sequel—and it’s not an impossible mission—then I’ll definitely include some tasks in the game. Tasks are a must.
