1950s high school LARP

So, with a hope to it being played at a future Chimera, I’m writing a 1950s High School LARP (Grease, etc). About 55 players roughed out so far, 30 or so written, but I’m looking for someone else to join in writing. This is all done on a Wiki (the same way Great Exhibition LARP was written) so nice and easy.

I mentioned this before in the Chimera forum but its quiet in there now. Anyone interested in co-writing?

Steve

i’ll give you a hand if you’d let me. my exams finish November 14th :slight_smile: totes keen.

and can totally help with the venue decor etc. :smiley: :smiley:

The development Wiki site is at seniorprom.wikidot.com/

You need to register there for an account, and then request access to the Wiki (its a closed wiki, obviously). I’ll enable your access and you’ll be in.

Obviously, being a co-writer means you’ll not be able to play the game, and you’ll preferably need to be there in a GM role… are you OK with that?

I have a lot of resources in the wiki for the setting but please feel free to add more. Most of the way the wiki is set up will make sense immediately - I’ve simply done it very similarly to the way the Great Exhibition development wiki was set up, and that worked well.

… anyone else? Ideally, a team of 3 or 4, then it would be easier to expant it to 70+ PCs and aim for the Chimera headline slot in 2010 or 2011…

Another team has applied and was given the flagship spot for 2010.

I have very specific requirements for the larp that fills the flagship spot at Chimera, and if you’re aiming for it to be run there, I am very please, but you need to communicate with me to make sure that what you are writing the fits the requirements. Communicating with me is an essential part of the process.

No worries, I’m still hoping to get a quality large LARP written that can be used at Chimera (or elsewhere); if it can’t be in the front spot then it could still be done in another spot. For me the funs in the creation.

I was going to have a word at the AGM but unfortunately couldn’t turn up due to family. It’s seemed a bit premature to talk before there’s anything other than ideas. Actually, I didn’t even know there had been any official call for proposals for Chimera 2010 yet.

The seeking for co-writers still stands, as the plan is to write it and then find out how it can be used. Maybe we can make Chimera2011…

[quote=“Anna K”]Another team has applied and was given the flagship spot for 2010.
[/quote]

when did this happen?

when did this happen?[/quote]

And what got it?

A few weeks ago. I posted my requirements for the flagship larp in the discussion thread, which included how to go about expressing interest. Discussion died on the public forums, I got contacted by writers seriously interested and from there, a team was formed who formulated an idea with enough scope for 85 players and a team with enough numbers and experience between them to give it good chance of pulling it off.

There will be an official Chimera 2010 announcement going up during this week as soon as the deposit goes through to the venue, which will include as many details as I have available to me at the moment, game writing guidelines, call for team members, etc.

Fair dos to Anna, she did post this on the 2010 flagship larp thread 14 Sep:

[quote=“Anna K”]Interested in writing the flagship larp?
If you are still interested in helping be part of the Chimera 2010 flagship team, can you please send me a PM in the next week or so? I am thinking of getting all the interested folks together for an in person discussion and seeing what develops.[/quote]
That’s pretty clear-cut in terms of how to apply. And it seems like a sensible approach, as the main thing a really big larp needs is fairly large team of people volunteering to do it. Although the populatity of the idea and the track record of the team would presumably be considerations too.

In an ideal world there would have been a post in that thread to say one had been chosen, but hey.

Ah - I know I posted a response to the question ‘are you hoping to run this as the Chimera headline LARP’ but I seem to have missed the request for a PM explicitly stating a bid within the following 2 weeks. Mea culpa. Anyway, as previously said, I’m still planning on getting this written, possibly it can be made available for the 2011 game or as a separate event entirely. 2 weeks would have been too little time for me to get together a team and a coherent bid in any case, I was planning to get something concrete before making an official bid.

Yeah :blush: I am sorry about that, guys.

There were three expressions of interest: the team that was chosen, Steve’s, and one other group who I declined as I did not feel they had enough people in their group, and their chosen theme was both I felt a little too niche for the flagship, and a little to close to the Flight of the Hindenburg (it was a cool theme, and if expanded out a little I think it would definitely be a contender in a few years time, but at the present it’s a little too close in theme to Hindenburg)

Steve, given your enthusiasm and that your chosen theme was one of the top two discussed in the post-Chimera discussion thread, I believe you have the makings of a great larp on your hands. However, I was reluctant to offer you the flagship position for two reasons. One is that you have two very young children and a third one due in May, and had not found a team to back up your efforts. Even with a team behind you, I would have been somewhat nervous about a team where the spearhead had such massive and fixed time commitments elsewhere. I understand that a newborn is a massive time commitment, and not exactly one that can be put on hold ‘just until Chimera is over’. Secondly, I was nervous about you following through with your commitment to the project after you left the Great Exhibition team six months in without notice or explanation as to why you were no longer present in the team. I understand from your PM to me that this was due to family reasons, which is fair enough, but Rowena and Dave had been relying on you, and you had simply vanished and stopped contributing without explanation.

History of delivering projects is something I look for in my selection process because this is a mammoth task to undertake and I cannot afford for my flagship to fall to bits four months out from the convention, or worse, for Chimera to arrive and there to be an incomplete larp delivered.

I would consider your 1950s high school larp for a future event, with a few alterations. Again, a team is essential, and I see you are actively looking for one, which is great. 55 players is an awkward number for me, because it is simply too small for the flagship (for 2011, I’m aiming for triple digits) and too large for one of the other time slots. This is what I mean when I say that if someone wishes to write for Chimera, it would be best to communicate with me before embarking, so we can make sure your project fits into the convention parameters. I think your larp has great standalone value, as it would be the sort of thing that would be fabulous to use to recruit new people who want to dip their toes into larping with an evening. I think it aslo has the potential to run as the flagship larp of a future Battlecry, AMERICA’s annual gaming convention which is developing a strong larping segment, and for which 55 PCs would be perfect. If you like, I can put you in touch with the larping co-ordinator of Battlecry, Peter Cummuskey. If you want to discuss options for making the 1950s larp appropriate to run at a future Chimera, Steve, I would love to hear from you via PM :slight_smile: I am sorry for any confusion over the 2010 flagship position - it was not my intention to mislead or offend.

With regards to the process for selecting the flagship, I have learned that in future I will be far more clear about the application process. I thought my requirements had been clearly posted (i.e. the need for a team and the number of characters I require) but perhaps it was lost amidst the discussion. This was my oversight. Truth be told, I am reluctant to get too formal about it all, as I think KapCon manages with a largely informal and fairly organic process where a team emerges from a group of interested parties, and “bidding” is only done if there is more than one serious team. That said, I would very much dislike treating people unfairly, or appearing to play favourites, so by the time this rolls around next year, I will have hopefully developed a fair middle ground. Please bear with me as I am still learning some of the finer points of convention running :slight_smile:

I hope I do not sound overly draconian in this post, I am always happy to discuss ideas for things to run at Chimera, and I’m always happy to hear from people who want to be involved. The essential thing is that we communicate, so I understand what you are trying to do, and you understand what Chimera’s needs and limitations are :slight_smile:

[quote=“Anna K”]Steve, given your enthusiasm and that your chosen theme was one of the top two discussed in the post-Chimera discussion thread, I believe you have the makings of a great larp on your hands. However, I was reluctant to offer you the flagship position for two reasons. One is that you have two very young children and a third one due in May, and had not found a team to back up your efforts. Even with a team behind you, I would have been somewhat nervous about a team where the spearhead had such massive and fixed time commitments elsewhere. I understand that a newborn is a massive time commitment, and not exactly one that can be put on hold ‘just until Chimera is over’. Secondly, I was nervous about you following through with your commitment to the project after you left the Great Exhibition team six months in without notice or explanation as to why you were no longer present in the team. I understand from your PM to me that this was due to family reasons, which is fair enough, but Rowena and Dave had been relying on you, and you had simply vanished and stopped contributing without explanation.
[/quote]

Thanks for the clarification on this.

The whole family commitement thing is why I was trying to get a team together before making an official bid - I know that while I have time for writing now, I’m unlikely to have much time after Easter. Therefore I need to get a team in place, and I was trying to get this ready before making a solid bid – I need people who can do the work at the event and just before, although I’m keen to do the writing. I was planning on getting the writing finished before Easter, so that the new baby would not be a problem.

Dropping out from the Great Exhibition team was, as you say, down to family problems. I had not made much noise about it but my father came down with lung cancer then and he finally passed away in May, after I’d had to rush to the UK to spend a couple of months there. This took over all the time from just before Christmas onwards, and so I let a lot of things slide with probably not enough communication. I had also not heard anything from the rest of the team either for a long time, so noone else appeared to be doing much before that either, but I should have untied myself from commitments more gracefully.

Aiming for 100+ people at the event will be quite an undertaking… I was planning on making about 80 roles in the HighSchoolLARP game (55 currently, with more created by the to-be-recruited team) but 100 will require major planning.

I can completely understand your choice for the event, given all the points you make, and my only surprise was that the decision was made so early - I was expecting to have to take several weeks to get together a team before I could make a reliable proposal, so I couldn’t get anything sufficiently solid together so soon in any case. Can I suggest that, for Chimera 2011, you post a clear set of requirements for proposals, and a deadline for them to be sumitted, a couple of months prior to the deadline (even if this means posting before Chimera 2010)? This will allow people time to plan and get together more stable proposals which can only be to your benefit. Chimera is such a big success, everyone wants to be part of it… :wink:

woah unnecessarily public…

Sorry, but I thought it necessary to explain why I was so unreliable last year. Without the extra info it looks like it was simply apathy…

I can take my stuff down, I though I was being asked for transparency so that’s why I posted publicly.

I think Zannii’s comment was in regards to the personal details in Steve’s response, Anna.

I don’t mind people knowing what killed my father; so far, I’ve lost two family members and one close friend to lung cancer directly caused by smoking, and if knowing this in any way encourages existing smokers to give up before it kills them as well then it will be a small compensation, in some way. Being able to say “I told you so” is not.

Everyone that I am related to, or have been a close friend of, who smoked has now been killed by it. And yet people still do it. :frowning: