Janina Waldmann

Every Friday night, under the cover of dusk, two enemies with a long-standing rivalry meet on a football field in Western Sydney to fight it out on the gleaming astroturf. Humans, goblins, elves, dwarves, orcs, gnomes, and hobgoblins – armed to the teeth with an array of latex covered fibreglass weaponry – all converge into a cataclysm of clashing swords and battlecries.  This is Live Action Role Play (LARP), and it happens every week in Sydney’s Rooty Hill. Photograph: Cassandra Hannagan Sydney is the permanent home of two regular LARP events. Battlecry: Age of Markoth takes place every Friday night. Battlecry players get together to act out fantasy conflicts based on the storyline developed by their administrator and club president, Tadd Lyons. Tadd has written a decade’s worth of lore for the world in which Battlecry takes place. His story revolves around two super-factions, the royalist alliance and the empire, and follows their generations-long battle for dominance, with the story having since developed to include an assassinated emperor, a missing heir, and all manner of battleground shenanigans. So, what happens when new players want to join the Battlecry world? "You turn up," Tadd explains. "You don't need anything to get started… you get given a basic costume and a weapon and we teach you how to swing the sword." There's no obligation to create a character when you first join Battlecry. As Tadd puts it, it's an opt-in process. It's also less male-dominated than one m