Pagan vs. Christian LARP

TNC always keep public unfriendly things, such as gatherings of robed cultists chanting, and sacrificing left right and center or summoning things man was never meant to be able to pronouce, kept safly in private places. we have never had any hassles from the public. I wont allow players to take weapons out of the private areas, and I wont use costumed NPCs that might nbother the public out either. we do all that stuff in private.
In saying that we tend to get some rather funny looks from people when we are all mincing about in our period garb. we often go off and get lunch on a saturday if we are using albany. they like staring at us in albany. but we wont allow combat, monsters of anything like that happen in public, it just causes a stir.

Just my 50 cents.

R (last of the big spenders)

Hi again
We don’t have the resource to use private venue generally in Quest, our player base and their monetary restrictions have always meant only tournament and banquet modules are able to use private venues.
And thankfully the Hamilton City Council is very good about us using venues as long as we are carefull.
We also let the police know what we’re doing, I guess this is standard for every larp but we’ve also had them call past after reports of a mob beating up someone using baseball bats (bloody boffer weapons).
Generally we don’t have hassles from the public either, I was just pointing out the potential for some serious misunderstanding if you played a christian vs pagan game in public.
Also because of the public almost all of our games are run during the evening… though when we have run day games we usually just get asked what we’re doing by bemused or curious types (often children).
A kid once asked if we were shooting a an episode of Xena :stuck_out_tongue:

Also the priest / religion / diety system is pretty important for Quest, and demons are regularly summoned by NPC’s in game. They are great modules generally because as well as the primary party plot the NPC’s and monsters have a story component. (like gather 30 items from this park beginning with S for instance).
Jared

I think it’s up to each larp to decide how they deal with religious sensitivities. It’d be a shame if we went in the ultra-careful route that a lot of US larps take, of not having any religion in their settings.

Mordavia has run in a church. While St-Matthews-in-the-city is probably a more liberal church, in general I don’t think religious folks here are all that intolerant. As long as it’s clear that it’s all fictional, most people aren’t too bothered including many religious people - we have a number of religious people playing at Mordavia, and I haven’t had any complaints. .

I guess thats case and point, as long as we’re not too insensitive about what we are doing then no one has much cause to be upset about what we are doing (in larp).

Most larp can get away with religious stuff because we don’t involve mainstream religion but if we use christianity vs pagans (with intent with using it as a source of conflict) I think that “someone” could be offended & could complain, who knows?

COULD BE, maybe, possibly.

Thats all, my 5 cents expended long ago.

There are indeed some freaky sects out there: a group of them live just up in Whangerei called Pious X Catholics. I’m not talking about the kind of Catholic I am (‘buffet- catholic’ as Jack calls me- meaning i pick and choose what i want to believe) But these guys believe in not that many rights for women…yadda yadda you get the point. One of them used to be my primary school friend then she became my penpal and we had bible debates. That was years ago.

ANYWAY I’m going off topic.

What I wanted to suggest was actually keeping the christian verse pagan idea- believe it or not. People who are well-educated and mature enough to not get upset knowing that its only a LARP afterall will have fun and i also think there are plenty of open-minded christians in Auckland who will let us hire out their church/hall for an evening larp- secure in the knowledge that its all a bit of acting for goodness sake.
In reality, I’m a fairly decent church-going catholic, but if this larp’s eventually going to go ahead- I’m SO being a pagan! :stuck_out_tongue: