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Please update your links.

I say rashly because at the time I had played in exactly 3 LARPs, one of which was an experience I really didn’t enjoy. However it seemed like a challange and I liked the theme, so I said what the hell!

Al Shir-Ma, as we named our 1001 Arabian Nights themed game, ended up being an interweaving tale of magic, loss, revenge and forgiveness for 66 players. Big themes for a 3 hour game, but judging from some of the write ups I’ve read people seemed to not only get it but have a great time. Though I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t really been searching out creative criticism. It’s still a bit close.

I could go into detail about what the year was like, but I think that Dale (one of my co-writers) says it as well as I ever could. Suffice to say that I am hugely thankful that the two people who were on this journey with me. Dale and Ellen just got it. There were times when ideas didn’t quite work but we managed to work through it all, and I’m hugely proud of what we achieved.

Normally in my KapCon write ups I go into detail about the other games I ran or was in, but to be honest everything else paled in comparison to running the LARP. I spent countless hours thinking, writing, meeting, talking and emailing about this game. I dreamt about it. I stayed up till 1am rewriting a whole faction after one meeting because I couldn’t let it go. Dale said it became my baby, and it’s a good analogy because after 9 months or so, it came to life in a blinged up Wellington High School.

So I all I really need to say is thank you. Thanks to everyone who played, thanks to Dale and Ellen for the crazy ride and for making me a better writer. Thanks to Bryn and Jackie and Scott for their awesome set dressing help. Thanks to KapCon for existing.

Next year though, I think I’m just going to turn up and play.

My fellow GMs and I looking exhausted.

• Start a new campaign set in a homebrew world. I’m currently working through my ideas and am hoping to start in late February or early March. Interestingly I finally checked out True20 to see if it would fit my ideas for a low magic world, with a not too heavy system and it’s great.
• Continue to get plenty of playing in. I can see one or two of my current games winding up at some stage soon and while one of those will be replaced with my own campaign I hope to fill the other with another longish term game.
• Get a PC. There are heaps of good CRPGs coming out this year and I’m sick of playing on the Xbox 360. I want a PC again, rather than using my TV.
• Talking of non table top games this year I’m looking forward to Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 2: Assasins of Kings, Mass Effect 3, Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and maybe even my first MMO, The Old Republic.
• I’m going to continue to LARP in one off parlour games.
• Write and run a small LARP (for about 15 people). My ideas at the moment are running towards a steampunk-esque Society of Explorers.

And I think that should keep me pretty busy. What about you? Any plans for this year?

• I spent the better part of 2010 writing, in collaboration with two others, a 66 person LARP called Al Shir-Ma. It’s set in an Arabian Night-esque world which borrows from Al-Qadim. It was done for the yearly KapCon gaming convention here in Wellington, and it’s first run through is happening next weekend. It’s been a really interesting experience and has I think made me a better scenario writer. But man, has it been a lot of work.
• I wrapped up my campaign, using the Green Ronin A Song of Ice and Fire rules, in a not hugely satisfiying way. By the end I’d kind of lost interest and time, and it all got a bit too railroady. It showed me that I really want to run long term games that leverage off character backgrounds and story rather than some over arching plot I’ve come up with. Means less work for me too.
• I ran Peril in King’s Landing a pre-written scenario for ASoIFRP. It’s one of the few times I’ve actually run a pre-written scenario and while I liked the low prep of it all, I found that I had the most fun when I was adding in new elements passed on player actions.
• I played a lot of Xbox 360. Notably Alpha Protocol, Fallout 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Fallout New Vegas. Some of these games, like Mass Effect, I played through for a third time so I could carry my character into the new game. Yes I am that much of a geek.
• I played a lot of table top and LARP games. For the first time I played more than I GM’d and it was great.
• I discovered some great new table top games like Prime Time Adventures and Apocolypse World.

So from a gaming perspective 2010 was great. Though as the silence from June on might have told you, other stuff wasn’t. Now though it’s time to look forward to 2011!

Briefly (for those reading this who weren’t at KapCon) Reunion was a scifi LARP set 500 years after the catastrophic shut down of the gate system which linked the Union of Planets. Suddenly those same gates have re-opened and now all the players are part of a delegation to the Nexus station to work out where to go from here and re-connect with the other planets. More information can be found here.

While I had a number of goals which revolved mostly around digging up dirt on one of the other delegates, I also had a personal quest to find out what happened to my memories. Then there was the issue of what happened to the gates 500 years ago.

While I wasn’t all that successful in my goals, I had a great time running around digging up secrets and trying to work out who had taken my memories and how I could get them back.

The highlights for me were:

• Having an “oh my god” moment when the station Bartender told me that people were needed to power the gate, moments before the official announcement.
• My genuine feeling of horror when I also realised that unless people volunteered to run the gate, we would all die. Though I did play it rather fatalistic on the inside.
• Holding another member of my faction against a station bulk head, threatening to throw him out an airlock unless he told me why he’d stolen my memories. He didn’t talk.
• Being approached by the high priest of Ecclatisa to assassinate someone, which I agreed to. That same high priest then approached me again to kill on of his faction, which I did while everyone was busy watching the 6 volunteers give themselves to Nexus (the gate system).
• And finally, spilling the beans on the fact that the factions of Arboria and Chapparal actually shared a planet, to the Ambassador to New Berlin. I think that might have set off a chain of events that saw the King of Arboria assassinated and that same Ambassador made Queen… but maybe that was already in the pipeline.

So all in all a great LARP. I think I might be getting the hang of it now, and will always make sure that I tell all my secrets. After all what fun are they if no-one else knows?