The Taupo Joust - Medieval/Fantasy LARP Wanted

Community Larp discussion
#1

The Taupo Joust is on Fri 2nd - Sun 4th Feb at Spa Park in Taupo.
Its going to be big with 7-10,000 visitors.

There’ll be a good attendance by various metal weapon groups from throughout the country and overseas. And of course a huge crowd of spectators interested in this type of thing

The organisers have asked me to pass on an invitation to run a Medieval/Fantasy LARP if we would like to.
Just a small introductory thing like “The Thin Red Line” at NAAMA last year.

I’m busy organising my ballista to be run during the weekend so I can’t do it.
Any takers? It’d be good exposure for NZLARPS.

Just a bit of further info:
Spa Park is free to camp on, theres a river next to it for swimming/bathing or you can pay $2 to use the showers at the pool complex across the road from the park.

Theres a general invite for all medieval’ish entertainers to come along - jugglers, firebreathers, musicians etc and panhandle if you wish.

Great Lake Medieval Festival 09
#2

Oh, and as a general query - who else is planning on going down for it?

#3

I was thinking about it, i have mised the last couple and I have good memories of the first one i went to.

I would be interested in staging a LARP for it but only if I had helpers, I cant work in a vacum, I have tried and it sucks, as does the result.

Could we use it to test run some of the ideas we are discussing here?

#4

I don’t reckon that a publicity event is the best testing ground for new ideas, given that we’ll be on show and that at best we’ll have newbies…

Tigger and I were discussing this and he reckons that we need to run something with high visual impact and quite attention grabbing that can run between the jousts. We had the idea of a semi-staged larp where certain staged events happen during the day - big, visual encounters - and the rest of the time, the characters wander through the crowd, interacting with the spectators (characters behaving IC, the crowd playing themselves) and handing out business cards.

That was our thought, anyway…

#5

if you just want to be seen by the public… then yeah I agree.

but if you want Any of the re-enactment crowd there to take us seriously we will have to do something to make them sit up and say hey wow that looks like my kind of fun.

Conal from the ravens has run larps with steel weapons at past NAAMAs to great success, but of lot of guys will looks at the weapons and go “What… they are rubber, stuff that.”

remember these are Living History and WMA people, and trying to get them interested in using boffer swords will be like trying to sell the idea of wearing white after labour day to Vouge.

#6

Remember also that with 10K people there are going to be a lot of people thinking “I’d like to do something like that”. Most of them are not going to run out and purchase a horse, harnes and a lance and start jousting. But many of them are going to be attracted to something with rubber swords.

If this is being looked at as a “recruitment drive”, then it doesn’t matter what the living history people think. They’re not the target and they probably already know about larping.

#7

But we don’t have any steel weapon larps to offer them at this stage. Assuming nzLARPS runs a steel weapon larp down at the joust and gets them all interested, what are we going to tell them when they come to play in our steel weapon larps? The ones we don’t have (yet)?

Personally, if a group is turned off by the notion of boffer weapons and roleplaying then I’m not sure that they’re our target audience.

I’d much rather focus on making the general public aware of what we do. There are a lot of people out there who would be keen…if only they knew it existed…

(Back in high school when one of my friends handed me the Mordavia rulebook, I read it and went “What! People do this??? And no one told me???”)

#8

You mis-undertsand me, all i was saying was that NAAMA has had some exposure to larping, but with steel weapons.

There used to be a guy in wellington I think who played one of the big LARPs in Britain, and he would bring quite a number of larp weapons to various camps for the kids to play with, but the grown ups had much more fun.

if we ran a larp at the joust i am sure that a lot of steel swingers would be into it.

Ok i accept that this is not the venue to test run some of the combat ideas we are talking about here, marc is going to do that with his test game in the new year.

so lets leave them till then

What kind of ideas could we use, come on guys the floor is open, Brainstorm.

#9

I think a small-scale run of the Grand Battle concept could work well here. It’s medieval, easy to explain, and would showcase roleplay (and Carl’s acting abilities for that matter) without requiring participants to get into character if they’re not comfortable with it. It would be suitable not just for combat enthusiasts but for the general public as well.

I’m happy to write up rules and a scenario for Feb. Although I don’t imagine I’ll be able to come, I’d happily get together with folks who are going and run through how a scenario could be run and do a couple of dry runs.

#10

[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]
(and Carl’s acting abilities for that matter).[/quote]

what is that supposed to mean :confused:

#11

I was being serious mate. Just take the compliment! :wink:

The concept is that the players fight out a series of battles over a kingdom. There might be a King versus a Duchess for example, with the Duchess leading a civil war against the King’s rule. The players just fight out the battles, but in between each battle is a semi-improvised roleplay display showing the rulers in their war-rooms reacting to the results of the battles. With the rulers being preferably played by some experienced actors.

For example, after a battle where the King’s forces have lost you might see the King’s commander reporting the results to him and getting a dressing down, in a semi-improvised scene that serves a dual purpose of updating the players on the state of the overall “campaign” (who is winning, by how much) and also giving a sense of story to tie the battles together. Ideally there would be a big campaign map that would be updated, showing the turning of the tide in the overall war.

When I say “battle” in this case I’m thinking twenty a side or something, that we supply with gear. In the full-scale Grand Battle the intention is to have hundreds or preferably thousands of players with their own gear.

#12

Sorry my bad thanks,

I am touchy about my acting, comes from the fact that it is not going anywhere at present :cry:

Sounds like a really good idea, but rather than rooms could we use tents?, one of the things they have at the jousting is a period tent village, so there will be lots of authentic tents and pavillions set up.

and the battles could be fillers between jousting contests.

I am now thinking that this would be like Live action street theater combined with the spectacle of battles. punters can walk around and pop into a tent and find themsleves in the middle of a intense role playing scene, and think “hang on what have I just walked into” and then ten minutes later they see a huge (relatively speaking) battle that follows on from the scene they just saw.

it would give it a kind of Time Travel Tourist feeling

#13

Im going down with the Auckland Norsemen, so i will be there with bels, wisels, trumpets and drums!!!

Hansi

#14

Par for the course in your industry, surely. At least you’ve got the guts to stick at it. Me, I’d like to screenwrite but the idea of trying to support myself with it would give me the willies.

Sure, could do.

I imagined the series of battles all taking place over the course of an hour or so, with the dramatisations being quickish interludes in between. Then you could rest for while and recruit another 40-odd people and do it all over again for another hour. In that approach, you keep all your players in costume and essentially provide non-stop entertainment for an hour.

Sounds like you were thinking of a more multi-part approach, which could work too. But it might be harder to hold the group together that way.

If you were using “command” tents for the drama parts, it might be best if you can get a tent that will half-way open up. Kind of like a cross-section. That way people can see what’s happening from outside - if you’ve got 40 people wanting to watch it might be hard to fit them all inside unless they’re massive. Aternatiuvely, standing just inside an entrance might still make you visible to spectators outside.

#15

hell yeah, some of them have pavillions that can be fully opened up on all sides,

and there are some that can fit large numbers of people inside, derek how big is Matts pavillion? that thing is like a four bedroom mansion, has he finished the study and gamesroom yet :wink:

#16

Me too, I already have a short film script sitting on the computer that i would dearly love to get produced, writing is a whole lot easier to do while working 9 to 5, getting your scripts produced that is the hard part.

#17

Sweet. Grand Battle is the next thing on my list of stuff to do anyway, so this would fit well for me and give a deadline which is always nice. We intended to have a test game for it early in 2007, so running a pilot at the joust is a great fit.

While it’s not exactly a tried-and-true formula larp, it’s based on some pretty simple principles and seems to fit the theme of the joust.

NZLARPS already has a lot of the gear needed, and I need to make more anyway for the big Grand Battle events. The project has been signed off and I’ve got a budget agreed with the society for a test event. So it’s ready for this next step.

Let’s see what Anna, Tigger and Nikki have to say about it.

#18

I think Matts pavilion is about 8m long by 3.5m wide. That’s a rough guess. We set it up with a four poster bed and two seperate rooms as a royal pavilion and there was enough room for all that and a meeting with maybe a dozen people on chairs/cushions.

Mine is about 4m x 2m which happily fits my whole family camping.

In both cases the walls are detachable so you can leave them completely off or leave a side open.

I often use mine at one end of a list field (the field with the fighting) as a pavilion with thrones in it. It allows me to look suitable important when I need to do that type of thing and gives a place for the gallery (audience) to gather if they need shelter from rain or sun.

#19

[quote=“Ryan Paddy”]Sweet. Grand Battle is the next thing on my list of stuff to do anyway, so this would fit well for me and give a deadline which is always nice. We intended to have a test game for it early in 2007, so running a pilot at the joust is a great fit.

While it’s not exactly a tried-and-true formula larp, it’s based on some pretty simple principles and seems to fit the theme of the joust.

NZLARPS already has a lot of the gear needed, and I need to make more anyway for the big Grand Battle events. The project has been signed off and I’ve got a budget agreed with the society for a test event. So it’s ready for this next step.

Let’s see what Anna, Tigger and Nikki have to say about it.[/quote]

I think the idea of a mini Grand Battle at the joust is an excellent one. It fits well with the fact that we will have short spaces of time to attract the attention of the crowd between the main events of the jousting and is a really good way to introduce the concept of larp to complete beginners.

We will need lots and lots of weopons though (larp safe) and volunteers to be safety marshals. Maybe we can ask the Norsemen to help with that.

Is anone else going down that would like to volunteer to help out?

#20

Nikki and I have had an idea for the story of the Mini Grand Battle (that’s some kind of oxymoron, isn’t it?). It’s one that is fairly well known and treads the line between fantasy and medieval.

Robin Hood!

We can have a few of the major characters - Robin, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Maid Marion, Little John, the Friar etc - wandering around in costume all day, interacting with the crowd. The Sheriff is hunting Robin Hood.

There can be lots of little staged encounters during the day - Maid Marion stolen by Robin Hood and his men, a duel between Robin and the Sheriff, a conversaton between Prince John and the Sheriff - leading up to the Mini Grand Battle between the Sheriff’s men and the Merry Men to see whether Robin can be rescued or not.