Back in 2018, the somewhat newly formed Croatian larp company Terrible Creations got together with the local Harry Potter fan club and made a wizard school larp for grownups. It was called called Tajna Stare Sušice, which could be terribly translated as Secret of the old Phthisis. Yes, at some point in history, Croatians named a castle after a disease, don’t look into it, we sure don’t.
Back then it was weird for Croatians to charge proper money for a larp. It was something like 110 euros, which sounded like an embarrassment of riches, considering we’d usually give like 5€ to spend three days in our own tent. But looking at it now, the price was laughably small. The larp obviously just lost money, they rented a whole castle / mountain home so we can live in it for the weekend and gave us all the meals plus unlimited tea and coffee. Oh and a free novelty magic wand!
What was the story? Not to go into details, I promised a reasonably short post, it was kind of like Harry Potter, but more heavily inspired by Dresden Files and Slavic folklore. All the player characters were ex students that were invited back to the Stara Sušica school of magic due to an upcoming invasion of some dark force or other. We were supposed to go back to school, re-do some of the lessons and prepare for the invasion. Everyone got a pregen character. Mine was Vjeran Kaimov, a magical inventor that always had some interesting prototypes. So, to prepare for a larp, I made a backpack full of silly inventions such as “a magical eye that can watch you without remembering or conveying to others what it saw” or “a tiny djembe that causes a 5 square meter wide earthquake of 2.1 Richters somewhere deep in the Nigerian desert”. Djembe got taken away from me about 5 minutes into the larp, because I was asked at the enterance if I had any magical objects and I said “yeah, tons”. Then they asked me “are any of them dangerous” and I said “hell yeah”, so I ended up in a separate room being questioned about every item in the bag and it was a lot of items.
The game was pretty whimsical and obviously took a whole lot of cues from the HP fan club summer activities. We learned to mix potions and cast spells, ate a whole lot, had a two day caffeine-fueled scavenger hunt and a whole bunch of other stuff. A staggering amount of times, people thought “maybe his items are actually what we’re looking for”, came to me, asked me to see an item, did the whole five minute ritual to read the little attached note and have the saddest realization that “anti x-ray glasses that see a nude or lewdly dressed person as if they were decently dressed” is exactly what I said it was. In the end, we raised a huge foam golem, survived the arrival of the dark evil forces person and my character even found a job by promising I would totally know how to improve my magnifying glass that translates a written language you don’t know into another language you don’t know.
In short, it was three days chock full of activities with amazing characters and lots of childlike whimsy. It was so fun and silly, not even I tried to ruin it with edgy bullshit. Due to the huge drain on resources and insane amount of work for the organizers did (changing a three story mountain home into a school of magic is a crazy amount of work), it’s kind of doubtful they would ever repeat the larp, but if they ever do, I’m definitely coming back. The orgs say if I come back, I simply have to play the same character. I’m definitely ready and I’m pretty sure I still have my upgraded version of the novelty wand.
