Growing larp in New Zealand

[size=150]Growing larp in New Zealand[/size]

Over the last 8 years, NZLARPS has supported a massive growth of larp in Auckland and Wellington. Now it’s time to start spreading this success around.

The NZLARPS National Committee has a vision to make larp available for people everywhere in New Zealand. Larp is an incredible activity, and many more kiwis would enjoy participating if they had the opportunity to experience it for themselves.

What’s the vision?

Larp isn’t just an activity, it’s a community. To be self-sustaining, local communities need a number of people running a variety of larps to meet different interests.

We believe that the formation of NZLARPS regional branches is the ideal way to support such ongoing local communities.

Local branches provide a democratic, self-sustaining structure that is refreshed each year with newly elected committee that can manage the community’s resources to everyone’s advantage.

NZLARPS provides regional branches with a backbone of support including bank accounts, legal structure, funding, equipment, membership management, logistics, advice, web hosting and most importantly the support of larpers from around the country who want to see larp succeed everywhere.

How do we get there?

Firstly, we need to get the message out that the society would like to see new branches formed, and why.

Do you know people outside of Auckland and Wellington who would like to see a variety of larp run in their area? Please get in touch with them, and see if they’d like to help form a local branch of NZLARPS. We’d love to hear from them, and help them to grow their local larp community. They don’t have to dive straight into forming a branch, they could start by running some games with the help of the society first.

Do you have novel ideas for encouraging local larp? We’re keen to hear them - often the best initiatives come from someone who can see an opportunity that nobody else does, or wants to get out there and try a new idea.

We know it’s hard to bootstrap a local larp community, we’ve done it ourselves. The society wants to be there to make it easier, and will support initiatives to take larp to new areas in every way we can. We’re here to help!

Feel free to reply here, or if you’d like to chat email marketing@nzlarps.org.

What else is happening?

Expanding local larp isn’t our only goal this year. We’ll continue to support the growth of the existing larp communities and games in Auckland and Wellington, and it would also be great to see ongoing larps for kids being made available in Auckland and Wellington, to complement the many great larps for adults that we already have. We’ll also be continuing our promotion of our awesome hobby, and expanding on initiatives like whatislarp.co.nz to help educate people about larp.

Cheers,

Ryan Paddy
National Marketing Officer
New Zealand Live Action Role Playing Society
nzlarps.org

I’m hoping to use KapCon to talk to people in Christchurch about this.

And further to the “how”: Jared’s strategy in Hamilton - establish a Facebook group to gather a community and let people find you, run combat practices and games so they can see different sorts of larp, creating an “expeditionary force” to visit other larp events - seems to be very effective.

Larp is sold by word of mouth. The best way to build a community is to run events for the friends you have, and let them do your selling for you. If you like theatre-style, then there’s a list of publicly-available scenarios here, so you can pick something which suits your group size. If you’re uncertain about what might work, I can give you advice about good games to start with (since I’ve played some of them and read a lot more looking for good games to run)