In 1983, I played in a D&D based LARP run by either TKS (Tiddlywink and Knucklebone Society) or TTN (Tonight’s the Night) which was run at Stoney Batter on Waiheke island. The following year, I crewed in a similar LARP at the tunnels on defence force land at Shakespeare Park at the end of Whangaparaoa peninsula. The latter had really high production values, including fireworks, and dry ice. I remember helping to dig two holes in the beach in which we hid, covered by blankets and sand, and when the players were led (by an NPC guide) between the holes on their way to the start of the adventure (or so they thought) we erupted in a totally unexpected ambush.
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Edit it in!
I still need to dig up stuff about Chapter Victoria. Sadly, not enough of Salient (the VUW student magazine) is online.
I’ve been through my old diaries, and can confirm that the Whangaparaoa game that I crewed in occurred on 2nd March 1985. I am unsure who exactly organised it, but it could have been DragonSlayers (or possibly AMERICA which had just come into existence).
The Stoney Batter game that I played in was probably on 7th May 1983 (first weekend of the May holidays). This was the 3rd (or 4th) such game because there were stories told about previous games, and for example, the Purple Worm encounter was a given because it had occurred at all previous games. I believe it was organised by the members of a University Club called TTN (Tonight’s The Night) which was a boardgaming / roleplaying / social cricket / drinking club, which gave the impression of being a group of friends who had worked out how to get AUSA to help fund their activities. A number of the members ended up with roles in student politics. Among the players in this game were John Broad (president of AUSA - who I don’t think had ever roleplayed before), Neil Reid, John Rodger, John Rattray, and John Haber, who were all involved in Student politics.
I played a Monk with 6 hit points (cf a fighter with 10, and up to 3 more based on the amount of armour worn). My special abilities included being able to block blows with my arms (encased in foam and cardboard), and land blows with the edge of my hands (wearing vinyl gloves), and being able to meditate twice during the game to recover 2hp each time (this was the equivalent of a healing potion, which consisted of a 500ml can of DB Double Brown which had to drunk in its entirety in order to recover 2hp). Weapons were tightly rolled newspaper covered with parcel tape. By time this game occurred, there was already a saying that “Monk’s die first”. Although I did not survive the day, I didn’t die first, and acquitted myself well, including landing blows on an Assassin who had just murdered a fighter from behind as they stood around a chest trying to decide how to divvy up the loot. I believe that Scoff (Mark Scofield) was the original Monk who “Died first” in the first version of the game.
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Awesome that you have those details with dates in diaries Brent.
Interesting to hear about TTN, my brother Brendan went to one of those Stoney Batter games I believe (with @Derek I think?) and I’d always thought it was with AMERICA. Maybe they took over some later runs of it, or copied the concept?
There was definitely a membership overlap between TTN and AMERICA, but the latter only came into existence in 1984 (if my memory is correct).
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I wonder when the first Stoney Batter game was, and whether there were other live combat larp scenarios (as opposed to battle games) before that? This places NZ right at the start of live combat scenarios internationally - they started around 81-83 in the US and UK.
Also, if it was a university club, I wonder if there’s anything in Craccum? Their archive up till 1990 is online here
Found one, the April 19, 1983 edition of Craccum (p 23):
In today’s money, that price is ~$70 / $82. Steep for a day game, but cheap for a weekend.
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Nice find! Amazing to have documented evidence like that.
I see the same ad in the April 12th edition. Did you try going further back? If this was the 3rd or 4th event as Brent says, I wonder if we can find ads for the first ones. Or for the Whangaparaoa game.
Any idea who RAF or JWB might be?
Here’s one from Sep 28, 1982.
Richard foster is described as one of the “leading lights” of TTN in an early edition, 20 Jul 1982.
There’s a pic of Richard Foster in 13 Jul 1982 as he was running for something.
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From Sep 22, 1982, in an article about disputes over Stoney Batter:
This one shows it as TTN running the games there, so presumably they had run at least one before this date.
Can’t find anything else in 1982 or 1981 by searching for Waiheke, TTN, A.M.E, and some other random searches.
I looked through all of 1983, then 1982 looking for larp stuff. And noticed the 1982 AMERICA con ad (was this the first battlecry?), but didn’t notice the D&D one immediately above it. I also saw the Stony Batter piece, but only skimmed it, and didn’t spot that it mentioned D&D.
From a general gaming history angle, there was also an ad for a PBM in the June 21 1983 issue. And letters alleging the student exec played D&D, and one from Alf’s Imperial Army about an incident around their annual capping battle with the engineers.
I really need to do a similar trawl through old Salients to find out about Chapter Victoria (the black hole in our larp history), but its only online up until 1981 
It is nice to see the phrase “Live Dungeoneering” in Craccum. I was racking my brain to recall what we called it at the time, and came up with “Live Dungeons” which I thought was correct, but wasn’t 100% sure. Considering that D&D was first published in the US in 1974, it certainly spread far and wide relatively quickly. The first role-players in New Zealand came from military table-top games because TSR were publishers of military simulation games, and rules for table-top miniatures. TSR was starting to branch out into other things, such as SF boardgames, and hence role-playing games.
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With respect to the cost, I think that the $20 included accommodation (sleeping on the floor of one of two borrowed holiday houses - one for players and 1 for crew), but not ferry, nor food, which was buy your own takeaways for the most part.
I did have a note in my diary that I was not sure that it was worth the expense - but I was extremely tight-fisted - my income at the time was a $27 per week Student Allowance.
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So, what did a “wide game” from the Auckland Revolutionary Army look like? (From the one from the August 6, 1985 Craccum):
Nice one. When I started larping in 1990 we called it widegaming. I believe I heard the term from @Derek, and I think he’s said it came from Scouting.
We carried on calling it that until around 1996/1997 when I got onto usenet and saw the battle between people (mostly in UK) calling it LRP and people (mostly in US) calling it LARP. I settled on LARP, then later larp, mostly because it was clearer how it was pronounced. But I was also convinced by the argument that the “live action” was analogous to the term used in film. I.e. instead of roleplaying in the imagination (or with miniatures) as with tabletop, we were using real “actors”. So the groups I was helping run - Portal Games and later Mordavia, called it larp.
I also rather like the French term “Le jeu de rôle grandeur nature” or GN, which although it sounds like it relates to roleplaying in the great outdoors, actually means “full scale”. It’s an interesting parallel to “live action”, in that it also means physically embodying characters rather than representing them some other way like a miniature, imagination, or on a video screen.
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I participated in lots of wide games during my time in Scouting, but they were not what I would consider larping, as there was no characterisation, even though our scout troop had more elaborate wide games than most other troops, (whose games were usually just “go home, stay home”, or “king of the castle” variants). For example, in one wide game (actually played around the university on a Friday night as our Scout Leader was the manager of the University Guidance Counsellor service), the troop was split into three rival gangs, who needed to collect puzzle pieces from a roving distributer, and get them back safely to their base. The puzzle once completed (or close to it), contained instructions on what to do in order to get access to the final treasure, which then had to be retrieved piece by piece back to your hide out. Each participant had a piece of wool (different colours for each team) tied loosely around the upper arm, and if an opponent (or roving “policeman” as played by the assistant scout leader) succeeded in breaking it, then you were dead, and had to hand over any puzzle piece or loot you were carrying, and head to the “hospital” where (upon completing a scouting related task) you were issued with a new life (ie new piece of wool). Wool taken off other players were kept as they also added to your team’s score at the end of the night.
One “wide-game” that I did play at university was the mid-winter solstice mistletoe hunt. The designated mistletoe (Kathy Musgrave iirc) went and hid herself in the domain. After a suitable period of time the participants then went mistletoe hunting. The organisers were wandering monsters out to get the players, by simply touching them. I’m pretty sure it was an elimination game, so once you were killed, you joined the monsters in hunting for other players.
The Auckland Regional Army and Alf’s Imperial Army organised large scale battles, where both sides battered each other with rolled newspaper swords, and defended themselves with cardboard shields. “Armour” consisted of leather jackets, or armour constructed of masking tape and cardboard. I seem to recall, eggs and tomatoes being used as ranged weapons. I do not think there was any concept of hit points - if you were being pummelled, you just fell to the ground. The rules that I remember were no head shots, no hitting someone on the ground, and no hitting while on the ground. I can remember weapon inspections prior to the battle starting to ensure that no-one had a core to their weapon. There was controversy when a particular “sword” was banned even though it had been made only of paper and masking tape, because it was so tightly bound, and about 5cm thick, so it was a veritable club.
There was also the annual capping week battle between Alf’s Imperial Army and the Engineers which was fought in a similar manner. I recall a group of us climbing onto the roof of the student union complex, and throwing water bombs down onto the battlefield below.
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I think it was a case of borrowing the term “wide gaming” from scouting but using it in a somewhat-related-but-not-really way as a word for larp before that word was known.
Those scouting wide games sound a lot like the game I played with friends in high school using the Steve Jackson game “Killer”. We started out with the basic rules doing “circle of death” type assassination games where you have to wear a mask to assassinate people with water pistols, and then made our own increasingly complex versions with teams, items to capture, places to visit, and so on. Funnily enough the Wikipedia article for Killer calls it a larp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer:_The_Game_of_Assassination
At that time (around 1990 to 1995) my friends were also running fantasy adventure larps, but calling it wide-gaming. To be fair, although we had “characters” there was often not much solid characterisation or world building. It’s curious how much crossover there is between these different forms, some of which have continued and developed (like larp) while others have kind of fizzled out. The “Killer” games in particular would be very difficult in today’s more weapon-conscious society.
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KAOS (Killing As Organised Sport) had increasing trouble with this, and they eventually just shut down killing rounds entirely.