LARP is life: Inside the Czech subculture of fantasy and foam swords
Live action role-play, or LARP, has carved out a vivid niche in Czechia, where castles, forests, and centuries-old villages provide the perfect backdrop for immersive storytelling. The Czech LARP community is known for its craftsmanship, world-building, and a sense of camaraderie that makes these events feel like stepping into a parallel world.
An army of Vikings stand in a staggered line facing their opponents across the wildflower-patched meadow, a steel and turban clad army of Knights and Arabian Mercenaries. Viking archers with tightly strung bows step forwards, firing into the air, beginning the battle. The two forces march forwards as arrows cut through battle cries, swords clash against shields, and spears stab at chainmail. This war at the edge of forested hills in eastern Czechia does not belong to the recollection of European history books, but to a group of Czech LARPers in the year 2025.
The word LARP stands for live action role-play and, boiled down, is an activity nestled between historical reenactment, cosplay, improv, and sometimes combat. LARP is like an egg, you can scramble it, fry it, boil it, or eat it raw, but it's still an egg. You can LARP a Lord of the Rings theme, Witcher, Harry Potter, Post-Apocalyptic, Wild West, Historical, Battle, Political etc., but it's all LARP. To the average citizen, LARP may seem like adults playing pretend in the woods, but for the LARPers themselves, it's a community, art, and even a lifestyle.
“The idea of LARP is that you look at a TV series or a movie and you say, ‘I would like to be that character and do stuff in that world instead of just watching the characters,” says a man standing with his group of Knights at the LARP event, Oř & Čepel, a medieval themed battle.
Battle-LARP is the most popular form of LARP in the Czech Republic. LARP events are usually organized over Facebook at any time of year and can span anywhere from two days to two weeks. In mid-May, Oř & Čepel hosted over 150 participants for the weekend at a camp near Trpík, 180 kilometers east of Prague.
“LARP is like improvisation theater. In my field, which is battle, it’s also a kind of reenactment. Sometimes the light side wins, sometimes the dark side wins, it depends on how the people fight,” explained Jan Vacíř, a middle-aged man holding a large flag and a crossbow.
Jan goes as Bob in the LARP scene – in this community people are known by nicknames which are earned, similar to trail names among backpackers. Jan has LARPed for 20 years and leads a group of his own group called Kilkenny.
“I work at the Ministry of Culture in support of the countryside heritage sites. I’m mostly behind my computer, so then I go out here and let the steam out.”
Jan says he doesn't often receive ridicule for this hobby, “People are more surprised that I work in the ministry.”
It’s not easy to fight all day in armor
While LARP is a tightly knit community, its members have an impressive diversity of careers: politics, construction, business, high school. Some are retired and many events are open to children.
“People are pretty judgmental, they think it’s just fun for nerds, but we are doing historical reenactments. It’s also not easy to fight all day in armor, it's quite heavy. It requires some skills, and sometimes it's pricey,” said 27-year-old Matyáš Kračmar, nicknamed lvice (lioness in English).
He’s not exaggerating, LARPers battle in armor weighing upwards of 30 kilos and custom black-smithed helmets. To help acclimate to the weight, some LARPers train in their gear.
“We meet in the forest on Sunday and for four hours, we beat each other,” said Matyáš about Jan’s group, Kilkenny.
Though wearing genuine armor in battle, the LARPers at this event used foam blades with wooden handles. There are some ‘real steel’ battles in groups like Goryničové or Morobud, which use dull but real steel weapons in battle.
Some LARPers who participate in real steel events sustain serious injury or get close to it and quit. Around the campfire after battles, people share ‘war’ stories of teeth knocked out, arms broken, heads cracked, and in one story I heard of a man whose eyeball fell out of his head.
While LARPer’s accept the risks associated with their hobby, they by no means intend to harm the opposing force.
“People have this urge to be aggressive and fight. In the excitement of the war, people who do LARPs know they cannot harm people. They learn how to stop, and how to calibrate their emotions. That’s what I really love about LARP,” said a woman nicknamed Merry who was herself hit in the eye by an arrow during the battle.
“Today I yelled when I was hit in the eye. I've never done that and I was so proud of myself that I learned to ask for help. When I was growing up I learned to not show everyone I’m hurt, but here I can yell, the fight stops, and they take care of me.”
“It's changing your perspective, you're touching feelings, touching the thoughts you never can touch in your normal life.”
LARP as total submersion
This is a sentiment I hear expressed constantly. Many people are drawn to LARP because they can have experiences largely extinct in the 21st century. This escapism element is especially intensified in story-LARPs which center around role-play rather than battle.
One of the largest LARP organizations in the Czech Republic, Rolling, organizes extremely elaborate story-LARPs from their headquarters at an abandoned military hospital in Terezín.
Rolling was founded 12 years ago by a lifelong LARPer David Wagner, who's well known within the LARP scene. I visited the Rolling headquarters a few hours before they were set to begin a three-day LARP called Requiem: Reichskinder.
The Requiem: Reichskinder LARP is an example of an almost purely plot and character focused LARP. For this game, the hospital represents a Rehabilitation Institute for Problematic Youth. The Rolling website describes Requiem: Reichskinder as set in late 1945 but is quick to establish that the game does not intend or attempt to be historical:
“Inspired by an uneasy period for Czech–German relationships right after WWII…players have the opportunity to experience the game either in the skin of Czech or German adolescents held in the fictional Czechoslovak re-education institute or in the role of the institute’s staff.”
As we toured the old hospital grounds I asked David how he handles the sensitivity of hosting a WWII-era LARP in a town that housed a wartime concentration camp. He seemed confident in Rolling’s ability to be respectful, explaining how they incorporate elements of Holocaust memorial into the game design and never use Nazi symbols.
A returning Requiem: Reichskinder player from Poland, Koba, also addressed the subject.
“This place has got quite an extensive history. It can be a point of contention, but I think Rolling did a really great job with handling this topic very sensitively. It's not a lot about Nazism, it's about the struggle of people that are stuck.
“I really think it's hard to explain to someone that has absolutely no idea what it's about. It's really more than the sum of its parts and you have to feel the so-called LARP magic.”
Rolling rents out most of the space in the hospital, using many of the rooms for costume and prop storage. The Requiem: Reichskinder game, however, occupies an entire wing of the building, including a gym, dining hall, washroom, a room of cots, therapy offices, and the cellar.
This LARP is on a tight schedule and runs non-stop, meaning that even the four hours of sleep per night are interrupted by the game.
“The second day starts at 4am, the whole building is shrouded in darkness, and all the lights in the corridors, which were white during the day, turn greener. So people are like, is this real? Or is my mind playing tricks on me?” said David as we walked down the halls lined with Czechoslovak propaganda posters and boarded up windows.
LARP “bleeds” into your life
Exhaustion and psychological fatigue, even in a fictional setting, can lead to what LARPers call “bleed”. Bleed is a term used to describe when in-game events linger and affect a person after the LARP has ended. Requiem: Reichskinder holds a reputation as being a psychologically intense game and bleed sometimes happens.
“I don’t see it as a bad thing,” said Koba about LARP bleed, “if you give yourself enough space to process, I think you can learn a lot about yourself.”
Bleed can still occur even in LARP that is not as role-play-intensive as Rolling.
Jára Surý, a 23-year-old LARPer whom I met at a separate event, spoke about the bleed experience.
“[LARP] bleeds into your life, even if it's only for a few days or a week. Something really bad happens to you or really rough, and you can remember it for the rest of your life.”
The Wild West in South Moravia
Jára, nicknamed Quizer, spends a lot of time helping refurbish a camp in South Moravia into a 19th century Wild West style town. This pseudo-Wild West camp is named Cody Town (as in Cody, Wyoming, USA).
Cody Town began when David, nicknamed Žabák (frog in English), and Lucie Kolísková, a married couple seeking to start a new venture, bought the property. For two years David and Lucie, along with a close circle of friends, have been renovating the site which consists of five cabins, a saloon, a teepee, and various half-finished structures.
This May, the Cody Town team hosted their second annual LARP event titled Mild Wild West: Luck of the Irish. For five days upwards of 80 people pitched canvas tents and were subject to Native American raids, shoot outs, saloon fights, brothels, and robberies. In many ways, Cody Town felt wilder than 19th century Wyoming.
This LARP event fell into the story-LARP category, although a more relaxed version than Requiem: Reichskinder. Players drop in and out of character during the day and pause the game at night. Besides organizers, each player is assigned a character equipped with motives and quests under the umbrella of a larger plot unfolding around them.
To keep track of the characters, a wall of polaroid portraits were posted outside the saloon and when a character “died”, their polaroid was removed.
The length of the story writing process for a LARP like this varies depending on complexity and game mechanics. The Cody Town LARP for instance took one man around a year to complete and included every flavor of Americana antagonist: confederate soldiers, rail company owners, miners, outlaws, etc.
Viktor Svoboda, a young man wearing a blue sombrero, played the character of Miguel Del Aspera. Viktor’s character arc consisted of finding himself blackout drunk in Cody Town and being unable to speak until he found a Spanish to English dictionary.
“After a few quests I found this and could speak like a normal person,” Viktor laughed and held the dictionary proudly.
Props include a thousand-dollar antique American rifle
While the costumes for a Wild West LARP can be cheaper to source than, say, medieval armor, often Czech LARPers are proudest of their dedication to historical and archaeological accuracy. Many Cody Town attendees sourced their cowboy boots from America and their ten-gallon hats from Colombia. A woman playing the role of town nurse, wore a flowing 19th century gown which she had sown herself and the man playing sheriff, carried an antique American rifle worth $1,000.
“We are motivating people to upgrade, not criticizing them,” said a man who traveled from Slovakia to attend the LARP .
“If you want to look beautiful, you have to invest some money. I have a good job, but I realize that some other guys don't, so we need to motivate these people to spare money, to have patience, and also not to have high expectations for someone who is earning less.”
Even with the dedication to detail, the atmosphere around Cody Town was festival-like, especially after sunset.
A typical LARP camp is dotted with campfires and an assortment of impromptu concerts which last late into the night and leave many LARPer’s hungover the next morning.
The Oř & Čepel event had a similar campsite format to the Cody Town LARP. After the long day of battles, many Knights and Vikings travelled home and those remaining returned to tents to shed their armor.
A few practiced fencing and archery in the fields until Jára, Viktor, and two fellow LARPers played folk songs around the fire. Beer and laughter were passed around and more than a few groups wandered off into the moonlit woods apparently on some “quests”. Exhausted and having heard many LARP tales, I slept by the fire using a borrowed elvish cloak as a blanket.
The next morning the LARPers said farewell and some promised to see each other at Helmáč, an infamous and highly anticipated LARP event in the summer. Sitting in the train returning to the city, I understood the fleeting specialness of the LARP environment. The battles, the camp, and the whimsy which for a moment replaced pestering cell phones and loud traffic with exciting adventure and genuine community.
