Great LARP events are not made...
I just got off of a two week run of staffing LARPs. Running a LARP in the teeth of summer is always a chancy thing. On both weekends we had our fair share of weather challenges. But all things considered (which is a huge qualifier) I think we did a pretty good job with both events.
Two weekends ago was the Numina event. It had been a about two months since the previous event and the staff had a fairly tight event scheduled. Our schedule was dense with scenes and mods and visits from NPC's. We were working hard on keeping several plotline's momentum going. We were also blessed with the addition of a couple of new NPC's, including bakeneko, bad_grief and The Amazing Stana, all of who most of staff were long familiar with from our NERO experiences.
We knew the weather was going to be hot but we figured we could cope. The tavern building on site was air conditioned, and there was a small logistics room available for staff that was also air conditioned. It quickly became the Monster Camp Annex, though the single window mounted AC unit could only keep up with about 4 people in the room. Any more than that and the AC comfort zone got reduced to about a 5 foot radius from the unit.
Friday night most people got to site in plenty of time and we were well on the way towards getting everything set up. I should mention that the site is a bit less than 4 hrs from where most of us live so we had been on the road and a bit out of touch for most of the day. So when the crazy freak storm blew through about 10:00PM it caught most of us off guard.
The storm was in and gone in about half an hour. But when it was over the power was out at the site, and stragglers told us there were trees across the road leading in to site. Some of the late arriving staff walked around 3 miles to site after parking on the side of the road. The campsite is way off the beaten path with nothing around it for miles.
The staff held a fast meeting and briefly considered canceling the event. The decision was made to go on. When we thought about it, the vast majority of the mods we had planned were going to run in the woods or in field with nothing but battery powered lights anyway. The lack of power mostly effected us in town where the cabins and tavern was unlit and without AC. But it wasn't unbearably hot at night so this wasn't an immediate crisis.
We managed to get the event started around an hour and a half late. We did massive triage on the schedule and either dumped or rescheduled a number of mods and then we plowed ahead with the game. The Friday night schedule was a little bit rocky but we got through it. Sleeping was pretty miserable and none of us were looking forward to the next day without power. Thankfully, power came back up around 9:30AM Saturday morning and stayed on for the rest of the event.
The heat still made most of the outside mods on Saturday pretty miserable, but the staff and PC's coped. I know I ended up staffing three separate mods on the tennis court. Normally that is our premier mod space. This event it was like running a mod on a giant frying pan.
Things cooled off quite a bit once the Sun went down, but by that time both staff and the PC's were pretty drained. We managed to get a large and elaborate final mod done and then we called it quits just a bit earlier than we normally do, but no one was complaining. We only had one big mod Sunday but it was a doozy. It was a raucous attack on two ships of pirates that some of the staff had repped on a field. It was a lot of swashing and buckling and gangplacks and boardings. It was a great way to end the event.
Despite the difficulties I continue to be encouraged by this game. In a lot of ways I felt this event was one of our weaker ones in large part due to the weather sapping our energy. But the PC's still seem very excited and invested in plot. Also encouraging was an entirely new team of folks that came in this time who all seemed to have a great time. I hope we manage to keep this momentum going through the one day event we have schedule in August.
I had been concentrating so much on Numina that I had not spent much time at all getting ready for the NERO event at the Metro chapter this past weekend. I had a number of smallish independent side and personal plot stuff I planned to run, and also one sizable Fae plot that was going to run across two mods. I crammed like crazy through the week to get all the writing done and props made. And like always a couple of stuff came up and got in the way and I didn't get it all done.
Still, I managed to get the vast majority of my stuff ready and written. I cut one small extraneous mod and I didn't manage to get my writeups out to the rest of staff before the event. But when the time came to head to the event I thought I was ready.
My first problem came before I left. The lady who I had pre-cast as in an important role sent me an email saying that she would be unable to make it to the event. This was a bit of a problem because the role had to be female, and I had already cast all the other female members of the regular NPC crew in other face roles in the plot.
The second problem surfaced when I got to site and was told that one of the PC's who I planned to leverage heavily in the Fae plot had gotten sick and didn't make it to the event. This almost caused me to dump the entire Fae series of mods I had planned. But then I discovered that one of the ladies who plays Numina had shown up and planned to NPC. I quickly cast her in the female lead role and rewrote my two mods down to a single one, and went forward from there.
The NERO Metro site sadly had no air conditioned buildings. And this was a problem even at midnight on Friday. We managed to pick the hottest weekend of the year so far to LARP. Friday it was 97. Saturday it got to 107. It was 104 on Sunday during cleanup.
The heat made the event brutal. After almost every mod I went back to monster camp and stood in a cold shower for 5 or 10 minutes just to keep from catching on fire. I must have drank a gallon of water each day. Maybe time has dimmed my memory a bit, but I feel like this was by far the hottest event I have every attended.
The heat made it very difficult to judge how well things were going. No one had any extra energy for enthusiasm. The PC's that went through my mods seemed like they were having a good time. Kind of. Maybe. They all seemed flat and listless, though. It was very hard to judge whether my mods were just not connecting with them this time, or whether they were just wilted by the heat. It could have been a little of both.
This was a transitional event as well in terms of plot. We opened the event Friday night with a big fat undead fight which served to close out the very last bit of unfinished plot from the prior plot team. The main plot now shifted back to the story line that was created and ran by the plot owner who was briefly back in country from where he has been stationed overseas. We also had a number of people move from staff back to the PC's ranks and that changed the town dynamic a bit.
I helped out a bit in the kitchen this time which was a bit of a change. I've helped out a number of times in the past but always as a last second volunteer. This was the first time I had gone into the event planning on doing a kitchen shift. The meal was pretty simple to prepare and serve though, so I didn't spent a whole lot of time working. We made a minor miscalculation regarding how long it would take roasts to cook and that meant dinner got done a little late, but other than that it was a complete success.
Once things cooled down a bit after dark on Saturday the pace picked up a bit. I ran one final mod of my own which involved a lot of running around for me and the PC's, which might not have been the best idea. We also did one final giant town mod and at that point the event more or less ended. I went to bed just a bit earlier than I normally did but by that time I think everyone at the event, staff and PC, were pretty much done.
I got up Sunday afternoon and started the long slow agonizing process of cleanup that I had been dreading. When I got out of the cabin and started moving around the camp collecting all the stuff I had strewn everywhere I was a bit confused at not seeing people. I figured they were all just sleeping late. Eventually after speaking to some folks I realized that there were probably less than 15 people total left on site Sunday morning. The vast majority of the NPC's and PC's had packed up after the event ended and gone home in order to sleep in their air conditioned homes.
I certainly couldn't blame those people, and had it been possible I would have considered it myself. It was a bit sucky in that it left the entire cleanup to just a handful of people. But in one of those weird twists when we finally finished moping the tavern and realized we were done it was only about 1:00PM. We had gotten everything done hours before we normally do.
One of the other guys cleverly pointed out that while there were only a few people around it was the same few people that always do most of the cleanup anyway. And since everyone else was gone with all their stuff that meant we didn't have to wait around for people to get up and get all their gear packed prior to cleaning out the cabins. So in the end we got out a lot sooner than we normally do.
Now that these two events are out of the way my schedule is fairly clear going forward. Numina has a one day event in August, and Madrigal has an event in September. In between are a number of NPC'ing opportunities, but today I am having trouble summoning any enthusiasm for those. But we will see when the time comes.