I’ve been fielding a lot of queries about submitting games for Chimera 2011 of late, so I thought I would put together this helpful post to answer some frequently asked questions!
What are the basic criteria for games?
- Characters must be prewritten, and mechanics must be reasonably simple.
- The game must take no more than three hours to run, including set up time, briefings and debriefings.
- One-off games are preferred, campaign games are invitational only. Campaign games may not include player characters from their normal campaign, and must not require any previous knowledge of the setting.
My game needs to run at a specific time, and needs 2 buildings and a helicopter!
We will do our best to schedule your game at a time most optimal to its success, but we need you to be flexible with us as well - not everybody can run on Friday night! Scheduling is determined by a lot of factors, and the chief aim of the schedule juggling act is to make sure that each round has enough player spaces to meet expected demanded, each round has a suitable variety of genres and styles, and that each round has enough playing spaces to accommodate all the games. It’s not half-tricky to get it to work, so it helps if there is no fixed time that your game must run. The same applies for where you would like to run your game - we will endevaour to give you the location that best fits your game, flexibility is helpful.
How many characters can my game have?
This year, we’re aiming for the stars, so each round, on average, will want to accomodate up to 100 players (with some variation - for example, Sunday morning is expected to be closer to 85) therefore games need to of a reasonable size. No game is to have more than 30 people (this includes GMs and crew) and we can only accept limited numbers of games with ~10 characters. If your game has only ~10 characters, consider writing your game so two simultaenous runs can be done at the same time (therefore, you only lose one round to GMing but two lots of people get to play your game!)
How many games will you need? How do you pick which games to run?
How many games we need depends on how many characters the games have. We will probably be needing four or five games per round, so somewhere between 20-24 games for the convention. We try to fit in all the games we are offered. If for some reason we cannot host your game, we will come discuss our reasons with you, but this should be pretty rare.
How many games can I run?
It’s actually a fair amount of work to write a game for Chimera and we try to spread the workload across more people rather than less, so you may run, at most, two original games (i.e. games that you are writing between now and Chimera), OR you may run up to three pre-written games (games that are already written at this point) OR one original game and two prewritten games. It is our hope, though, that nobody will need to run more than once or twice in the convention.
What sort of help can Chimera give me with my game?
We want to make the game running process as easy for you as possible. From March onwards, the Chimera team will be in touch and available to support you through the process. We will help you source gear, help you liaise with players and be on hand to help pull things together when things go pear shaped. There is a fair amount of backstage chat between the GMs in the months leading up to the convention, so there is a good sense of community with the other game masters and the organisers.
For whatever reason, I am not able to write a new game but would like to run something at Chimera. Can I do this?
Not a worry. Any game that has been made available to run, or you have acquired permission from the original writers, can be run at Chimera.
How do I submit a game?
To formally submit a game, please email the following details through to chimera@nzlarps.org, and we will be in touch to discuss:
Title:
Authors:
Blurb: (to interest potential players, so no spoilers)
Cast List: (if available, otherwise character numbers and gender ratio. Please indicate what the minimum number for the game to run is.)
Costuming Requirements:
GM Contact Info: (to go on the website)
Any other considerations for the convention organisers to know: i.e. this needs to run at night, this needs to run outside, I will need a helicopter and an active volcano…
I have a question you haven’t answered here.
I’m happy to answer it 
) so why not think about starting to write a game for Chimera 2011? 