Welcome to Diatribe Navish, Aviva and Jeff. Sounds like you’re all interested in fantasy larp in Auckland, in which case there’s heaps on offer at the moment and more on its way.
The big fantasy campaign right now is Teonn, which has a couple of weekend-long games left to run before it wraps up. The next weekend game is in May, that’s what I’d recommend checking out.
There is also Sabbat which is due to start this year and will be a series of day-long games, and The Crucible which is a new fantasy campaign that’ll start in 2014 and run for full weekends, and the organisers intend for that one to be huge. Campaign events in Auckland have gone from having around 30 people ten years ago, to about 160 these days, and I’m guessing it’s going to grow into hundreds of people at events in the next few years. Which probably means moving towards tenting at events (like is common at big overseas larps), because it’s hard to find venues that can accommodate hundreds of people, even in the bunk rooms that are commonly used at the moment. So, you’re joining in at an exciting time.
Besides fantasy, I’d recommend trying out some other styles of larp to see what you like. There’s a series called Friday Night Larps starting up soon that’ll be a great introduction to larping with each game being a different genre & style, and in August there is the larp convention Chimera which has around 30 different larps across the weekend and a big 160 person larp on the Saturday night, so it’s possible to try heaps of games at once and get to know folks between games.
You’ll find there’s a massive friendly community of larpers in Auckland that often become friends outside of gaming. We also have the New Zealand Live Action Role Playing Society (NZLARPS) which is a cool organisation that helps games financially and with gear and promotes larping (and joining up will save you money on event fees), and a fair amount of larp stuff gets posted to the society’s group on Facebook if you wanna join up: facebook.com/groups/5598024429
EDIT: also, if you’re looking to buy fantasy larp gear check out my site at www.paddywhack.co.nz