There’s a new writeup about NZ LARP history on Wikipedia –
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LARP#New_Zealand_History
DIATRIBE is also linked as a portal.
Anyone know who made these changes?
I think the emphasis on vampire and non-contact may be inaccurate. From what I know there’s been a fairly even split between contact & non-contact larps in NZ. It used to be much heavier on the contact side, before MET took off.
Most groups are formed out of (or influenced by) university clubs, which might bear mentioning.
So change it! That’s what Wikipedia is all about! 
which is why you should never trust a wikipedia site after I’ve been there, unless I particularly like the subject
I’d have to disagree. I’ve been quite heavily involved in LARP’s since the mid-eighties, and I’ve never been involved in a “contact” one, assumng you mean one with contact violence.
Though I suppose Alf’s Imperial Army skirmishes and KAOS might count.
I didn’t attend an MET LARP until about 1997. Admittedly the vast majority of the earlier games were comittee-style games.
I’ve been involved in LARPS where people touch each other though, i.e. where the MET “no touching” rule was not followed, if that’s all you mean.
See, my personal experience starting around 1990 is all live comabt (which is what I mean by contact), and I learned from older people who were already doing it. The AMERICA Auckland Uni roleplaying club was doing live combat at that time, don’t know if they were doing abstract resolution or no-combat as well.
It’s hard to judge from personal experience, hey? Maybe we should do a survey.
But it does sound like I was wrong about non-contact LARP coming here on the back of MET. What did you call it at the time? “Live roleplaying”?
Also, I think the Auckland and Wellington experiences have been different. Perhaps Wellington was and is more abstract/freeform/theatre style focused, and Auckland has had more live combat.
Argh, I feel old.
I started LRPing in about 1980. The Dragonslayers ran a big boffer brawl on Northhead that had maybe 100 people at it. It was lots of fun but you basically had no role playing and one hit point and went to a ressurection point for five minutes.
I thought “hey, this’d be more fun if we had character classes”.
So I made up rules and classes and spells and stuff based on AD&D and we played for years. The role playing aspect of it never caught on with about 50% of the players who just wanted to fight things.
I think I’ve only ever played one non-contact game. It was basically a “host-a-murder” fancy dress party type thing, played indoors over one evening.
I really like the direction LRP/LARPing has taken over the years. I’ve seen the same thing happen in tabletop games as well. People have become better role players and the games have become less black and white (the PCs are no longer the goodies killing orc bandits).
Not sure what we called them, some people used the term “wide games”, and some were called “comittee games”, those tended to be more goal-oriented, like “Beanstalk” last year or the classic “Sortilege”
Ywah, well I’ll avoid making any comments about Auckland!
Actually I only moved to Wellington in 96, my earlier expereinces were in Christchuch and mainly at variuos wargame and SF conventions, such as a Star Trek game run at one convention.
People who were in the White Company (early steel fighting group) way back when talked about being in ‘wide games’. Although I think that the scenarios tended to be fairly simple, sort of like “You’re a merchant, you guys are guards and those guys are bandits out trying to rob you” and “Let’s attack a fort” type thing.
We used to call our live combat games “widegaming”, until around 1995 when I got on the internet and clicked to the international trend.
I’ve had a tutu with the Wikipedia LARPS entry. Mostly what I’ve done is remove absolutes, such as “most games are non-contact…” and replace them with things that we can be more certain of, like “many games are non-contact…”
The entry still feels slightly bitsy. Perhaps NZ LARP could be better summed up as saying there’s a lot of diversity and mentioning a few ends of the spectrum.
That’s right! I never knew where the “widegaming” name came from. I seem to dimly remember the term used at Scouts for pretty much any kind of outdoor activity involving sneaking around.
Now that I look at the other country’s history entries, what the NZ entry seems to miss is real history. What organisations started doing what sort of larp when, and what inspired them.
Here’s what I know about live combat games in Auckland:
I ran a group called Portal Games that was inspired by AMERICA’s live combat games and started running medieval fantasy in 1990. Portal ran a series of 30 or more single day one-off quest events. The number of crew playing NPCS generally outnumbered the number of players, and the crew were also recycled into other NPC roles so that the party could encounter lots of NPCS over the course of the quest. At first the setting was unspecified generic fantasy, but eventually an original setting was developed and characters sometimes recurred. Portal also ran some one-off modern horror games with live combat. Game size was around 20-40 people. Some events were purely multi-sided combat scenarios.
Scott Farndon started running The Dark Gate in 1999, based off the Portal Games events and following a similar model. Game size was around 20-30 people.
Lateral Worlds was run by Anna Cruise and Eamon “Patch” Zink. I believe it started in around 1997 (although I missed the first few events so could be wrong), and ran until 2001. It was a live combat campaign in an “open world” setting, where characters could be imported from any fantasy source. Game size was around 50-60 people. Most of the participants were players, just a few played NPCS. The game ran over a weekend and included food and accomodation. These are the first full weekend events that I know of. It may originally have had links to AMERICA as well - that’s where I heard about it.
Portal and the Dark Gate dissolved in 2001, when Scott Farndon and I started Mordavia together. Anna and Patch have both helped with the game too. Mordavia is a live combat medieval dark fantasy campaign, set in a lost kingdom in C15th Romania. It is inspired by the setting of the computer game Quest For Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness (Copyright © 1994 Sierra Games), although our setting varies greatly from the original. The main events take place over a weekend and include food and accomodation. Players usually outnumber crew, but crew are recycled into various NPC roles. The setting is strongly affected by player character actions. We’ve announced that the campaign has a finite lifespan, and that the setting will either be saved by the player characters, or be destroyed. There is no fixed timeline for the campaign end.
There have also been a number of other short-run larp groups. There was a group of Russian larpers called Mithril who ran Tolkien and Dragonlance inspired live combat fantasy with weapons made from aluminium tubes. A Viking game run by Wotan’s Volk, created of Lincoln Wood and inspired by the Dark Gate games. There was a larp-ish medieval fantasy event called the Gathering in 1999 run by members of the Auckland Sword and Shield club, which had around 70-80 people from numerous different groups.
In all of the games mentioned aboce players designed their own characters, with the exception of the modern horror games run by Portal Games. In the case of Mordavia, players often design significant aspects of the setting as well. Most of the games had systems with Hit Points that are lost when you are struck with a weapon.
And there’s also Skirmish, which formed independantly of any of the groups mentioned above. I think it was inspired by live roleplaying in the UK.
Skirmish, originally called LARPHS (Live Action Role Playing & Heroics System), was formed in 1995. It was developed independently from other games, although some players may have also played widegames with groups such as Alf’s Imperial Army or the McGillicuddies. The premise was an implementation of the classic D&D Party vs Goblins mode, although it was subverted with respect to the party being viewed as imperialist reavers, and the goblins as being peace-loving indigenies.
The inspiration for Skirmish was not, however, other games of a similar ilk. Rather it was pyschedelic drugs, with a particular favourite being magic mushrooms. Of course, the rules were specifically designed to offset these substances with liberal quantities of beer. Nowadays, we settle for copious quantities of gingernuts instead (higher glycemic index, but generally more manageable 
).
There have been lots of cases of parallel evolution, people saying “hey, we could play D&D live!”
But if LARPHS was developed independantly, then how did “Live Action Role Playing” get into the name? I never even heard that name until around 1995, where I picked it up off the internet while researching live roleplaying in other parts of the world. Before then I’d only heard it called “live roleplaying”, or “widegaming”.
Serendipity.
Or something like it. The foundation LARPHS crew were largely a bunch of anarchofeminist street performer types. We did lots of creative stuff, including developing our own roleplaying and board games, so it was only natural that we develop our own LARP.
We only needed a cheap, light and cost effective way to make swords. After an overnight excursion to Whatipu, Andrew Bolesworth and I espied the perfect weapon - dried harakeke stalks ! Not bad as a primer, but quickly improved upon with our homegrown boffer designs.
Although it is possible that Andrew, who came up with the LARPHS acronym, had heard LARP someplace else, it was certainly the first time I had come across the phrase. It seemed an apt description and it stuck. Until I began to notice that the roleplaying aspect was rather minimal when compared to other larps, and then I held a meeting and changed the name to SKIRMISH.