Well, the first ever Chimera is over, everyone survived, even my sanity 
I had such a wonderful time with you all, and hope to see everyone again at future larps 
I will be posting lost property lists sometime in the next few days, when Iâve recovered. Things found so far include some shoes, a black coat, a watch and a book of Euripidesâ plays. If you think one of them is yours, PM me.
Well then, what a weekend.
I just want to extend another big thanks to Anna for the insane amount of effort that must have gone into this, and to all her support team for keeping her alive throughout. In a nutshell - this weekend was amazing.
Not only was it incredibly awesome to get into some new games with the more frequent faces from my recent games, but it was fantabulous to meet a whole army of new people that are into this craziness as much as I am. Add to that âsqueeâ the chance at new LARPs (Flight of the Hindenburg FTW!!!) and even new genres that Iâve not had the chance to participate in, and youâre left with what is quite literally "Awesome In A Can"TM.
So yeah, cheers Anna, Queen of Awesome. Long may you reign supreme.
On a side note, thanks also to all the Knightshade players. Iâm still astounded at the effort put in for the costumes (particularly the Wildings, confirmed as my favourite race 
), and the support you showed for the game itself was great. I hope you had a great time, and look forward to seeing you all in future!
Tired. Be brief. Brain not workee.
Chimera: DO WANT. MOAR PLZ.
[size=150]S.Q.U.E.E.E.E.![/size]
Awesome awesome awesome weekend. Huge thanks to all the people who put this thing together!
So neat to get there and go âwow, look, all these people I donât know!â Some new, some back, some just from genres I donât play (like Requiem).
Finally got to check out the Nightmare Circle people are always going on about. It did not disappoint! My character was not originally written as a medically incompetent doctor willing to torch a mansion to cover up a death by malpractice, but hey, there you go. Maggots, ack! ewwwwww⌠shudder. Raoul you are a sick, sick man. Do it again!
Knightshade rocked. Canât wait for the rest of the campaign. Loved the hungry troll. I look forward to attempting to bury far more undead creatures in the ground to feed my sapling hordes. (ok, I just completely made that last bit up, but anyway)âŚ
Flight of the HindenburghâŚwheeeeeeeeeeeeeee! so. much. fun. I wanna erase 5 hours from my brain, borrow a time machine and go back and do it again! All the costumes were amazing! Why couldntâ we vote for our top 10 costumes? One was too hard! I loved playing with you all.
Serenity. Plague ridden hillbilly, trashy whore, guard with a really big gun, alliance soldier, indentured chinese slave, i got to do it all, lol. Hopefully we added to the game rather than distracted from it.
Lets do it again next year! Can we? Can we pleeeeeeease?
[size=200]Next time I will be coming for the whole lot. It will take a death in the family or the birth of a child to prevent this. Everything else will not sway me. I will NOT miss out again![/size]
Awesome convention.
We had folks from Auckland, Hamilton, and Tauranga right? Any others places that supported our claim of a ânational larp conventionâ? 
Definitely be cool to spread it wider in future years.
Steph was up from Welly
Stephanie flew up from Wellington (as did Fraser, I assume!).
Any south islanders?
Oh yeah, Steph. I think of her as an honorary Aucklander
Fraser is living up here these days.
National LARP heck - we had international attendance! How many conventions can claim that in their inaugural year?
As for the events, my only regret - I had to miss two sessions.
POING POING POING! ZOMG!!! FUN FUN FUN!!!
nothing else more to say yet, still on a high from it!
Anna i can sum up both Chimera and you and your efforts in one wordâŚ
[size=200]AWESOME!!![/size]
How did organisers find Chimera in terms of getting players? One of the big issues in the last couple of years is that itâs hard to get players when there are so many larps happening. Did being part of the convention make getting numbers easier?
For Tryst, I found that I got a lot of players who I didnât know at all, which would have been really unusual if Iâd just advertised it on Diatribe as a separate event. If I was running a campaign like Knightshade or Serenity, that would have been a huge bonus in terms of attracting new people to the campaign.
For The Flight of the Hindenburg, I think the fact that it was headlined the convention brought in the big numbers we needed to run it.
So overall I think the convention was an awesome idea (on Annaâs part) in terms of giving players and organisers access to each other. I reckon itâs going to become a highlight of the larping calendar.
One thing I enjoyed about Chimera was that I played a lot of games I might not otherwise have played.
However, one of the very hard things about playing all these games immediately after each other was trying to maintain a high level of costuming and character preparation. Normally, when there is an evening or weekend game, you have the weeks leading up to the game to throw together all the little bits and pieces that really ad to a costume. Likewise, you can think about the character, their background, their accent etceteraâŚ
When there are 5-6 games back to back this luxury is lost. For many of the games I felt like I went in only half prepared. Costumes didnât feel âfinishedâ, characters didnât feel as âroundedâ and I kept buggering up my accents 
It was still absolutely worth it. But this was an added challenge that I hadnât fully allowed for.
I think dispite a couple of few last minute changes all of my 20 player slots were filled! I had 2 additional players turn up on the spot who had not previously registered.
I was pleased to have a few new faces in Knightshade. For my debut game, I think it went well, for an event where the primary writer/GM had to leave half way through, I think it did very well.
I had hoped for a few more Hamiltonians but to be honest I donât think we campaigned hard enough down here for that. We were just too busy organising our own thing.
Next year we can hit it the marketing hard down here but I think the ball has started to roll for LARP, this convention has the potential to go to extreme size and really highlight this pass time/hobby/way of life to New Zealand.
If nothing else I count it a success for Knightshade but I know that other LARPS went off the charts as well.
i had no problem with getting players, my actual booking sheet was for 40+ i think i had around 30 on the day and many of the new players have told me they will be back for the next serenity weekend game.
i looked on the whole thing as both a means to try out new games and meet new larpers, which chimera helped me achieve admirably.
Size is an interesting thing.
The 60+ people we had was enough size to give Anna a herculian organisational task when spread across a weekend and multiple larps. It would perhaps be easier to organise one big weekend larp like Wolfgangs, because a single larp has fewer moving parts.
It might seem like things just grow naturally if theyâre popular, but I find that size of events is largely dependant on the willingness and capacity of the organisers allow it to grow. When Mordavia briefly hit 70 people, I realised that my capacity to organise it in my spare time had been reached, even with considerable help. I stopped advertising as heavily, to let it settle to a managable size.
For Chimera to grow any larger, I think it would have to be organised by a team of people, not just by Anna with somewhat ad-hoc assistance from Nikki, me, and some others. A structured team, with delegated responsibilies, and time available to make it happen. Time before the event, time at the event, and time after the event. Backed up by automated systems wherever possible.
There are some other interesting questions. Where to hold it? If we want it to be more inclusive of national larpers, Auckland may not be ideal. Could Aucklanders and Wellingtonians perhaps meet in a central location in the North Island, perhaps via bus? Or would this lose more people than it gained, and stretch the logistical difficulty too far? How long should it run? It was going to be one day this year, it only ran the whole weekend because you canât book Motu Moana for one day. How to ensure a top-quality feature event for the evening? In Wellington a team of four larp writers compete to write the next larp straight after each Kapcon, and then have a year to write the larp for the next KapCon. Thatâs how an incredibly detailed larp like Hindenburg got written.
I agree Ryan, size is limited to the organisational ability of those in charge. And those in charge did admirably!
With the resources I had, I could have managed up to 30 people, 1 GM for every 15 is probably pretty tight. But then again I had a big open space and then again not everything went to plan (but almost!).
Knightshade started somewhere around 30 minutes over due, which is funny cause the crew started an opening scene before all the players were organised! Oh well, it happens, plans last till first player contact etc.
So to go bigger, we would need bigger venue and bigger and better organisational teams, so once a year is probably more than enough strain on GMâs and organisers also operating other LARPs.
Not to say this time didnât go well, from what I can see it went with only minimal issues.
Iâm positive itâll work again.
One other thought on size - what would writing a Hindenburg-style larp for 200 people be like, I wonder? I know that some Nordic pregen larps are written for hundreds of people, they use large writing teams to achieve it I think.
Iâm so blown away by the Hindenburg larp that I canât even imagine what one for 4 times the people would be like! Iâd play though.
Weâd need a premise that would cater for so many people⌠and yeah, if it took 4 writers a year to write (an admittedly AMAZING) Hindenburg, then there would need to be what⌠10/12 writers? Or would that many just trip over each other?
I noticed a certain separation of basic stories. My stories had absolutely no connection to aliens or superheroes, for example. I wasnât even aware they existed until I saw a guy in a black cape. even then I thought âweirdâ rather than âheroâ
So I assume you donât need to interweave all the characters, which helps. Ok, Iâm just babbling nowâŚ
wanders off to find thinking cap
Do you reckon that might be better with a 1 day con with only 3 larp sessions? So only three characters to master.