Manticore

Last weekend was the last larp of the year for me: Manticore X.VI.II - Stilte voor de storm II.

As two of the team just became fathers we made this a so called 'mini' event. This meant less plot, less time etc. This to put less pressure on the team.

In the end we delivered what we promised. But while some thought it was again a great event, others, mostly new players, thought it lacked something.

For us as a crew it was an exhaustive event as we were undermanned for this one. We even had the ill luck that one of the team had an accident the day before the event and his knee was wrecked and thus could not attend the event. Michaël, best of luck with the healing of the knee.

Given the circumstances I think the event was good, we only need to make certain that we always foresee (and use) something for the new players.

As Vincent already told most people: we can use more people in the Manticore team. We can not keep up delivering good events with the current amount of people, we need fresh blood :-)

Caege was a success

While I wasn't attending this event I've heard that it was considered a success by all who attended.
Although there were some minor moments: e.g. the dreaded Saturday afternoon dip that all Belgian Larps know.
But it seems that the overall event was well liked by those who attended.

Reports like this make me sad that I have such a busy agenda. If I could I'd attend all the larps that I want, but sadly real-life is taking more of my time meaning less time for larps.

Anyway, congrats to the Caege team.

Calam was a great success!

Well it's a long time since I last blogged so let's give you guys and girls some updates :-)

Calam was a success
This time I'll not use my own words, I'll let the participants speak:

"To say it with the words of Saturday evenging: fracking awesome
Oh ja, the demons are sissies, if I could do all that I'd dare it too "

"Calam was an enjoyable experience
from the point of view of an NPC it was a wonderfull interaction between players and npcs
it always made me more anxious to stay more IC when seeing the other participants
I really loved the quote "that's no metal sir, it's vulcanic glass, that's something completely different"
I'd say, all join for good rpg and athmosphere"

"I can only agree, Calam is so much more than other Larp's.
With the limited amount of participants it looked like a peronal LARP
I'd say, join us if you like some decent roleplaying"

"Calam II was super. I really enjoyed my time there. The location was beautiful (ok, at night "a little bit cold", but still beautifull). I really enjoyed the story, the just enough story and just enough fights
so congratulations to the crew, to the npcs and to anyone who cooked this weekend"

"Thank you, to those who organised it, for the memorable event, and all the effort being put in. And thank you to the playerbase, who made the great moments all the more fun, and with whom I had some hilarious OOC moments as well."

"First of all I would like to thank everybody for the great weekend. Special thanks to the crew that spend a lot of time in scouting for a location, preparing and organising the event. Special thanks to Jeremy, Steven and Chris for making it actually work."

"You can be sure we'll be back.
Thx to the crew, it was really great.
Special thx to Steven and his Defender (you saved us a LOT of trips)."

As you can read it was a success. I'm rather proud of my crew to help me pull it off and make Calam achieve the goal I was aiming for.

No more Caege for me
It's not that I don't like Caege, I actually LOVE the world and there are some really good roleplayers there. But for Elves there's not really much to do.
Oh, I hear ya telling me to stop playing an Elf, but if the organisation doesn't provide things to do for Elves then they just shouldn't let players allow to choose an Elf as race.
I did enjoy myself last time, but that was because I made my own game. And frankly, if I have to make my own game in order to have a great time, then I believe 105 euro's is far too high participation fee. I have nothing against a Larp asking players to make their own game, but then the price should be accordingly.
I stop with Caege with pain in my heart, as it's the only larp I'd consider playing an Elf (and no, I won't consider Poort, as Poort is too old-school for me and I only hear negative feedback from friends who play/npc there). But with my diminished time schedule for larps I need to cut somewhere and Caege had enough reason for me to send it to the chopping block.

How much money is a larp worth?
Well in the previous topic I stated that 105 euro is too much for a larp where I need to make my own game in order to enjoy it. So what are the items that make me decide if a larp is too expensive or not?
Well I'll try to set up a list of things that I take into account when I choose a larp:

• game world
• rules system
  
• food/drinks included
• rpg standards
• visual realism
• amount of scenario
• amount of fighting
• distance from my home

Game world
That's an easy one: if the game world intrigues me I'm already with half a foot in.

Rules system
Well this is more complicated. Sometimes I'm all in for a complicated system, while I personnaly prefer the free-form system (like Calam and Dragonbane has).
I think it mostly boils down that if the system is too complex or leaves the game wide open for abuse I might not participate in that larp.

Food/drinks included
If food/drinks are included in the fee I would be ok to pay a bit more for the game. But since I organise larps where we include food and drinks I know how much it all costs. So you need to provide some pretty good food/drinks to make me pay say 40 euro's more for a larp :-).

Costume&rpg standards + visual realism
I'm grouping these threee as for me they are the main deciding factor to participate in a larp.
If a larp would allow US type of weapons, I'm out. If they allow sneakers, jeans and tshirts I'm also out. If there's too much suspension of debelief needed (aka visual realism sucks) then that's not a larp for me.
I also hate the fact when people talk too much OOC. I have no problem with a little OOC talk (I'm guilty as charged), but I still remember a larp when we were in a high tense moment, ready to kill the first who would blink in the wrong way and suddenly the main person said: "Hey, 5 minutes ago, did you ask if I had object X IC or OOC", the guy said "IC of course...", and then she would reply "Oh, but then I didn't say IC that I had it, I thought you asked it OOC". I mean, that's the worst roleplay I ever encountered. Larps where such things happen on a regular basis (people dropping in and out of the game at regular intervals) I leave aside.

Amount of scenario/fighting
If there's too much brainless fighting I won't participate. Also if there's little scenario then I won't participate if the price it too high (too high is subjective to the other items here)

Distance from my home
Well this one is easy. The further away a larp is the higher quality it must have. As I need to take into account the higher traveling costs.
For example Outlore cost me around 200 euro's but it was worth every single cent. I almost believed I was really in that game world and that's already worth some extra money :-)
The price was also high because I had to do a last minute booking of the eurotunnel and that I was alone in the car. I believe I can bring the total cost of Outlore down to 120-150 euro if I book on time and have someone along in the car to share transport costs.

Till next time

Dragonbane II

While pondering about Dragonbane I posted on Facebook that I'd love to get some idea if there would ever come a Dragonbane II. One of the former team-members of Dragonbane then posted that I'd probably had to do it myself if I wanted a DBII.

Since I'm never scared to take up a challenge I'm asking you: "Would you be willing to travel all the way to the middle of Sweden to spent a week (5-6 days) in the middle of nowhere and larp like you've never larped before?"

If the answer is yes, then let me know. If I get around 50 serious commitments I'll start working on a possible Dragonbane II. BUT, be aware that it will take at least 2 to 3 years to organise such an event.

First we need to get permission to re-use existing DB material, next we'll need access to the site, then we'll need to know the state of the village is (last I heard it was rather bad), we'll need money to fix the village and most importantly: we need crazy people like you and me to go there and fix the village.

So if you're fed up with me telling you how GREAT Dragonbane was and how it's still, to this date, the BEST LARP EVER, then let yourself be heard and let me know you're committing to attending DBII (whenever it may take place).

PS: if you're not sure you'll be going to Sweden for a Larp then DON'T commit!

Non-larp post

BEWARE: this topic will NOT be about Larp!
This will probably be the first topic not about Larp and for a long time it will also be the only one not about larp.

It will be a topic about TABLETOP RPG!

Long before I participated in a Larp I played AD&D and Star Wars D6. It was in those days that I started to really love role-play and started asking questions about this thing called 'larp'.
Now I'm pretty sure a lot of larpers also play tabletop rpg and it's for those people that I want to talk about XDM!

XDM (X-treme Dungeon Mastery, but it also stand for the X-treme Dungeon Master aka the person running a tabletop using the XDM rules) is what I've been looking for for a long time. If I'm Parsifal then XDM is my Holy Grail (when speaking in terms of tabletop role-play).

Since my early days of tabletop role-playing I was missing something. Not knowing what I was missing led me into buying all kinds of DM guides, Gamemaster guides, books with new systems, etc.

A year ago I discovered Castles & Crusades from the hand of Troll Lord Games. This was a mix of D&D 3rd edition and good old AD&D. I thought my search for the ideal tabletop system was finished. I introduced it immediately to my new campaign Mythandir Chronicles and off we went.
But it still wasn't perfect. For me the perfect system is one that provides rules, but doesn't complicate the game for the DM/GM/... And while C&C makes a good show of making the game simple I still had to look up some rules while running the game.

In comes XDM
So while C&C was not yet perfect it was the best I had found, so I still used it and vouched to re-read the rules again and again until I would know them by heart.
But then I stumbled upon something called XDM. X-treme Dungeon Mastery, hmmm strange title, but wait I recognise one author: Tracy Hickman. Yeap the same guy who co-wrote the very first fantasy book I ever read: Dragonwing from The Deathgate Cycle. This was one of the people who made me fall in love with fantasy. So on a whim I pre-ordered the book (earning some XDM levels along the way :-) ). When the book arrived I read it and was amazed, bedazzled, stunned, ... you get the point. They were talking about fog-generators, laser beams, pyrotechnics and even magic tricks. Well I just LOVE the book!
The goal of the book is NOT to make us quit the gamesystem we all love (be it C&C, D&D (3rd 3.5th, 4th), SW D6, ...). No! It strives to make us better DMs/GMs/... by bringing the essense of the game back: yes, I'm talking about the fun.
With good examples the book explains how you can spice up your tabletop game by adding extra's. How about handing your players a real handwritten letter instead of just saying "you find a letter in which is stated...". These are all things that we find natural in a larp, but they also work perfectly in a tabletop.
This book is full of ideas for a DM to bring their games to a next level.
But that's not all, there is also a section for the players. That one tells the player to play their character, not to play a puppet using die-rolls.
Of course, this book wouldn't be complete if it would not also have it's own game system :-). XD20 is for me the same revolution as a larp that goes with WYSIWYG rules.
XD20 wants to simplify the game by having very little rules to give the XDM more freedom to focus on the game, not the rules. Ah, this is exactly the same phylosophy I uphold for my own larps :-)

XDM is written by Tracy Hickman and Curtis Hickman, with excellent drawings by Howard Tayler. It costs $29.95 and is absolutely worth the money.
Go to http://www.xtremedungeonmaster.com and go buy it NOW.

Fighting in larp

A couple of months ago I posted a message on larp fora to ask for people to accompany me to Outlore in the UK. To show how cool it was I posted along some videoclips from previous Outlores.
The result was a cry for unsafety, disaster in making etc.

It's seems that in Belgium a lot of larpers are afraid of some bruises and want super safe fights.
Now I also like fights in a larp to be safe. But aren't we overdoing it here in Belgium?

My first larp at Conquest of Mythodea introduced to me fighting that was a lot harder than in Belgium. Harder weapons, shieldbashes, etc. But did I cry out that it was unsafe? No, I actually enjoyed it immensely.

I still remember when I was a kid we played zorro. We hadden WOODEN sticks that we used as swords. Some of us even had hard PLASTIC swords that are way harder than the hardest larp sword. You can even buy those today in toy shops!

So why is it that some larpers cry out that we are fighting unsafe with our very soft latex coated weapons when we allow kids to hit eachother with wooden or hard plastic swords?

I believe that with some common sense and safe weapons and shields (i.e. all foam shields) you can have some 'hard' fights where the worst one can get is some bruises.

I still remember the guy with a gambeson under a full plate armour who was crying out when someone hit his SHIELD to hard. I mean, a foam weapon on a foam shield and that guy (in full plate) was complaining of the hard hit.

Maybe we should have a larp revolution to bring the fun back into fighting instead more and more safety rules.

Dilemma

Last weekend was Conquest of Mythodea and some of my friends went their. It seems I missed great game. This was the first in three years that I didn't attend Conquest and I'm really wondering if Avatar was worth it to miss out on Conquest.

I have one big dilemma and that is that I'm having less time to play all the larps I want.

If I would only think about myself I would go to Conquest next year and skip Avatar. Avatar is nice and I have a lot of friends playing there (plus the organisation I preside runs a faction there), but Conquest is a total different league. And in my opinion so much better than Avatar. At Conquest they 3000+ participants, 800+ NPCs, toilets running on water, great atmosphere, awesome costumes and much more.

What would you choose if you can only do one of the summer larps. Avatar, Conquest or something else? Let me know in the comments.