Hi,
Me and my friend would be interested in joining a larp but don’t know where to go etc? Can anyone tell me where we might find a friendly beginner larp we can join or maybe we can be in the background so we can build up to fully joining in? We both live in Auckland so would be restricted to the surrounding areas.
We are very excited to join in so thank you all in advance 
Hi GeekGoddess,
Come to Chimera! (24-26 August, Motu Moana Scout Camp in Green Bay, link to the website in the Chimera part of this forum.)
There are a whole slew of games available, a lot of which are just fine for someone who’s new. You can come for just a game or two, or the whole weekend, and you’ll get a chance to try out a bunch of different things and meet a lot of the larping community.
(Plus there are other one offs and campaigns and introductory events running in Auckland, which I’m sure one of the Aucklanders will very quickly tell you about. 
)
Take care,
Steph
Hello, and welcome to the community. I know this looks like a wall of text but hopefuly it will tell you all you need to get started.
One of the best ways to get involved in a game is to get stuck in and play. Find the organisers and tell them your interested (pay if its not a free game). Simple as that.
You’ve got 2 options here in most games, crew or players.
Crew is a good way to begin. You’ll be helping the game run. playing bit characters that change. Its cheaper. You have people to guide you more. You have your costuming and kit supplied (just need to show up in simple plain clothes that can go under stuff). Down side is you may learn behind the scenes info you may not want if your going to switch to being a player.
As a player you get the full experience and usualy play one character the whole game but though a little more costly and you have to provide your own costume and kit. If you meet people before your first game and strike up a good relationship, you MAY be able get into a group to help you along or to borrow bits of spare gear from them (but don’t pester people into lending you stuff, we do it out of kindness don’t take advantage).
Now on to the games.
Chimera, as has been said, is a great first event. Its a weekend long event made up of smaller games. Each day you’ll get to play 2 small ~3 hour games with a small group of people from the community which will change each session. Plus theres a bigger scale game on the saturday night thats always interesting. This event showcases the wide scope of games in larping.
But there are alot of other games running in Auckland.
Teonn is a good “classic” larp game (Foam swords and all that stuff). Its the society’s biggest game, and the biggest in NZ. It runs a few weekend long games a year, as well as a couple of day games. Lots of people involved in this, you’ll easily meet most of the community at one of these games and people here are super enthusiastic to chat about the hobby (the down side of that is it could be overwhelming with all the people you’ll meet if your a bit of a shy person, but remember that we mean well). And there is a day game of that coming up.
There are 3 “World of Darkness” campaigns ATM, though one of those is coming to an end in the next little while. WOD LARPs if your not familiar are based on the popular tabletop RPG games, where you play a supernatural of some sort (or human fighting against supernatural forces). These sorts of games are always going on, when one wraps up another tends to pop up. Right now there is a small game where your play vampires struggling for power and survival (a slower moving game), a game where you play werewolves that are tasked to police the spirit world (or people related to them) and a game where you play magic users with the ability to shape reality (which is wrapping up and by that I mean both reality and the game 
). Each of these run a game a month which means we’re never far from our next larping fix . They are heavier of the rules sets (particularly the bits that simulate combat or supernatural powers) but there are people more than happy to help you out if you need it and actualy dont come up as often as some people say. Low costume/kit requirements as well as they are set modern day so you CAN wear normal clothes and foam weapons are not used.
There are quite a few “one off games” (games that run one self contained session) and smaller campaigns and for those you’ll want to keep an eye on the Auckland sub forum of this site (Though some of those may not be the best for starting players).
The only games I’d suggest shying away from if you looking for your first game are “Witch House” and the WOD game thats starting to wrap up (purely cause its coming to a close and theres alot of backstory).
That being said I hope to see you and your friend at some game soon.
-Cameron (One of the many)
I endorse what Cameron said. In fact, it would be great if we could put his post up as a “New To Larp ?” sticky post.
The only addition I would make is to clarify that Witch House is specifically design for experienced larpers, hence the warning that it is not a good choice for new larpers. Challenging material and all that.
That being said, we have a slew of great larps coming up, so I would recommend signing up to something that catches your interest - especially Chimera. If you need advice, assistance or gear/costumes, please post here on diatribe. The community here is very welcoming and supportive and we like to assist, so I’m sure we can help you out
If you’re interested in meeting some of the local community, a bunch of us are doing some training on Sunday mornings from 10am - 12 noon.
You’d be very welcome to come along and say “hi”, watch or join in and find out about the local games.
[quote=“Derek”]If you’re interested in meeting some of the local community, a bunch of us are doing some training on Sunday mornings from 10am - 12 noon.
You’d be very welcome to come along and say “hi”, watch or join in and find out about the local games.[/quote]
So is it every Sunday? I think it would be good to come along and meet everyone to start off with
[quote=“Cameron”]Hello, and welcome to the community. I know this looks like a wall of text but hopefuly it will tell you all you need to get started.
One of the best ways to get involved in a game is to get stuck in and play. Find the organisers and tell them your interested (pay if its not a free game). Simple as that.
You’ve got 2 options here in most games, crew or players.
Crew is a good way to begin. You’ll be helping the game run. playing bit characters that change. Its cheaper. You have people to guide you more. You have your costuming and kit supplied (just need to show up in simple plain clothes that can go under stuff). Down side is you may learn behind the scenes info you may not want if your going to switch to being a player.
As a player you get the full experience and usualy play one character the whole game but though a little more costly and you have to provide your own costume and kit. If you meet people before your first game and strike up a good relationship, you MAY be able get into a group to help you along or to borrow bits of spare gear from them (but don’t pester people into lending you stuff, we do it out of kindness don’t take advantage).
Now on to the games.
Chimera, as has been said, is a great first event. Its a weekend long event made up of smaller games. Each day you’ll get to play 2 small ~3 hour games with a small group of people from the community which will change each session. Plus theres a bigger scale game on the saturday night thats always interesting. This event showcases the wide scope of games in larping.
But there are alot of other games running in Auckland.
Teonn is a good “classic” larp game (Foam swords and all that stuff). Its the society’s biggest game, and the biggest in NZ. It runs a few weekend long games a year, as well as a couple of day games. Lots of people involved in this, you’ll easily meet most of the community at one of these games and people here are super enthusiastic to chat about the hobby (the down side of that is it could be overwhelming with all the people you’ll meet if your a bit of a shy person, but remember that we mean well). And there is a day game of that coming up.
There are 3 “World of Darkness” campaigns ATM, though one of those is coming to an end in the next little while. WOD LARPs if your not familiar are based on the popular tabletop RPG games, where you play a supernatural of some sort (or human fighting against supernatural forces). These sorts of games are always going on, when one wraps up another tends to pop up. Right now there is a small game where your play vampires struggling for power and survival (a slower moving game), a game where you play werewolves that are tasked to police the spirit world (or people related to them) and a game where you play magic users with the ability to shape reality (which is wrapping up and by that I mean both reality and the game ). Each of these run a game a month which means we’re never far from our next larping fix . They are heavier of the rules sets (particularly the bits that simulate combat or supernatural powers) but there are people more than happy to help you out if you need it and actualy dont come up as often as some people say. Low costume/kit requirements as well as they are set modern day so you CAN wear normal clothes and foam weapons are not used.
There are quite a few “one off games” (games that run one self contained session) and smaller campaigns and for those you’ll want to keep an eye on the Auckland sub forum of this site (Though some of those may not be the best for starting players).
The only games I’d suggest shying away from if you looking for your first game are “Witch House” and the WOD game thats starting to wrap up (purely cause its coming to a close and theres alot of backstory).
That being said I hope to see you and your friend at some game soon.
-Cameron (One of the many)[/quote]
Thanks so much for all the info! I think we would prefer to start off as behind the scenes / background to get a feel for everything. I shall go and check out the link for the Chimera event I hope to see all you guys soon
[quote=“GeekGoddess”][quote=“Derek”]If you’re interested in meeting some of the local community, a bunch of us are doing some training on Sunday mornings from 10am - 12 noon.
You’d be very welcome to come along and say “hi”, watch or join in and find out about the local games.[/quote]
So is it every Sunday? I think it would be good to come along and meet everyone to start off with [/quote]
I’ll certainly be happening next Sunday. Attendance varies with the weather
Note that the Sunday morning training is specifically for fighting with foam weapons. Some larps have this kind of fighting n them, others don’t. So at the training you’ll find a subset of the community who have an interest in getting better at fighting. Which is great - if you like that kinda thing.
Chimera is definitely a great event for new larpers. Lots of styles of larp to choose from, pretty much the whole community is there, and there is plenty of time between games when you can talk about larp and ask questions.
Totally understand wanting to start slowly, but personally I’d recommend just jumping in with two feet. Being a bystander at a larp really doesn’t give you much of an idea how awesome taking part is. It’s almost like watching someone read a book, compared to reading it yourself.
[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]
Chimera is definitely a great event for new larpers. Lots of styles of larp to choose from, pretty much the whole community is there, and there is plenty of time between games when you can talk about larp and ask questions.
Totally understand wanting to start slowly, but personally I’d recommend just jumping in with two feet. Being a bystander at a larp really doesn’t give you much of an idea how awesome taking part is. It’s almost like watching someone read a book, compared to reading it yourself.[/quote]
Agreed. Don’t worry about being a newbie, funny thing is we like seeing newbies, we like to coach them and help them because we were new once too. And Newbies keep larp alive! Without fresh faces our community couldn’t grow and grow it has!
[quote=“Jared”][quote=“Ryan Paddy”]
Chimera is definitely a great event for new larpers. Lots of styles of larp to choose from, pretty much the whole community is there, and there is plenty of time between games when you can talk about larp and ask questions.
Totally understand wanting to start slowly, but personally I’d recommend just jumping in with two feet. Being a bystander at a larp really doesn’t give you much of an idea how awesome taking part is. It’s almost like watching someone read a book, compared to reading it yourself.[/quote]
Agreed. Don’t worry about being a newbie, funny thing is we like seeing newbies, we like to coach them and help them because we were new once too. And Newbies keep larp alive! Without fresh faces our community couldn’t grow and grow it has![/quote]
Okay maybe we should just sign up for some Larps and see what happens. However, can we explain before it starts that we don’t have any experience? I would hate to turn up and people except us to know what to do lol.
Absolutely, if you let people know you’re new they’ll help you get the hang of it.
If you haven’t seen it already, this advice for new larpers might be useful:
Feel free to ask here on Diatribe if you have any questions. All questions are good - we were all new once and didn’t know how things worked. Every larp is a bit different, so the answer will quite often be “some larps do it this way, other larps do it this other way.”
If there’s one larp to definitely go to at Chimera, it’s the big larp on Saturday evening. It’s the game with the most players, the biggest budget, the most spectacular set, and more players tend to go all-out on their costumes for it so it usually looks nice. This year it has a fairy tale theme, which is very accessible I think. Previous years have been space opera, western, Victorian, and 1930s pulp.
Hi GeekGoddess,
I’m Anna and I’m one of the organisers of Chimera. If you are interested in coming along to that event, I’m happy to put together some advice on which games still have space and would be suitable for new people. I would really love for you and your friend to come and give Chimera a go, we’ll support you however we can
Anna