Bezkrálí VIII. Up to the land of dreams come true! (lost pictures from 2007)

Let’s start with the official teaser from that year:

In the year of the Lord 5702. The result of an extraordinary journey of rescue and discovery to Eumerike was the revelation that the Fountain of Youth, the Golden City and many other legendary sites are located on different worlds that are often not exactly thrilled with visits from “curious” adventurers - but that’s a minor detail. Of far greater importance to the Empire is that on this distant continent, a new prophet of Surahind, St. Alicia, has arisen, whose recognition by the Church of Surahind will be highly problematic. Additionally, Dorwinion has quietly begun to engage in superpower politics in the territory vacated by the destruction of New Pontia. In this, of course, he struggles with the Kamichatka, who has attempted to plant a new Grove near the Lost Colony.

It’s challenging to find information about a LARP that took place almost twenty years ago. Even the official game Wikipedia doesn’t contain anything but than this teaser. I remember far more from the very first Bezkrálí on New Year’s weekend 2002 when I was one of the players — but players usually remember more since they’re actively engaged in the unfolding story.

This particular LARP took place less than a month after I’d bought my first DSLR, the Canon EOS 400D, and was still discovering how it worked. I’d used digital cameras before, but they were all automatic point-and-shoots. This was my first manual camera since the shutter on my old Zenit E, which my dad had given me, died. And let me tell you—it was quite a challenge.

I’m not trying to apologize for the quality of these pictures, both technically and content-wise. These photographs are objectively poor. But this is how I started publishing LARP pictures on this website. I had taken some even older LARP photos with a film camera around 1999, and some of them were actually printed in the Czech SF&F magazine Pevnost. That happened because I knew the author (who was also the original mind behind this LARP) of the articles they accompanied, and there were simply no other photos available. Maybe someday I should visit a public library and try to find those issues in their archives — I don’t have copies or even remember which issues they appeared in.

If you want to know more about Bezkrálí (Kinglessness), you can check the Wikipedia above, browse more photographs from The Game of Queens from 2010, or read about Pirates at Bezkrálí from 2016. There will be more posts in the future—I just need to find them in my archives…