Monday, June 11, 2012

Calam V went the extra mile for larping

While I've been rather silent on this blog (what else is new? :-P ) I've been rather busy with larping.
I went to the UK for some excellent larping at the Dumnonni Chronicles larp (best larp after Dragonbane), having your own IC village really helps getting the mood right :-).

I also prepared for the first Calam event of the year, which took place a week ago. Well, Calam V was awesomely great! :-) Everybody who was present had a great time, telling me that they bring more people next time.

One of the things I was extremely happy about was how the inn-personnel handled the inn. While at Calam IV we had a great inn, that looked good (including the curtains we put up), where food was served in a real fashion, we now went the extra mile.
At Calam IV people could only choose one item on the menu and food was served at fixed times.
This time however food was served all day round AND you had a choice of 4 dishes. YES, we had a real-feel inn at Calam V! :-)
When at Belgium larps food is provided by the organisation it's in all cases typical camp-style => no choice in food, food served at fixed times, people line-up to get their plate filled, people have to clean their own plate and store it themselves. As we can all agree this is not really in-character, it breaks the game.
That's why I'm so happy with my kitchen crew (aka the inn-personnel) that they made it this awesome and really in-character => a real menu, no line-up, you don't need to have your own plate, eating at ANY time of the day, no cleaning of plates, ...

Of course Calam is still a small larp (25-ish players), but still, we are (as far as I know) the first larp (in Belgium) that offers this kind of realism. The only things we still miss to make our larp 100% in-character would be that all participants have IC shoes and our game area has 100% IC buildings. But well, small steps at a time will (hopefully) get us there, no?