"So You Want to be a GM" slides

At dinner after SLAW, several people expressed interest in the slides from the "So You Want to be a GM" seminar that Ariel Segall and I ran in the MIT Assassin's Guild, and I realized that I hadn't posted them here in a follow-up.

So, here are the "So You Want to be a GM" seminar slides.

One of the people I was talking with pointed out that the slides very much reflect the cultural particulars of LARPing at MIT, and wondered if other LARP-writing groups have similar documents. Does anyone here know of something like this in their own LARP group, or have pointers to similar things which are publicly available?

Intercon Precon Needs Panelists!

(tl;dr You should fill out the Precon Panelist Application survey. Deadline is Thursday, December 20, one week after game sign-ups are fully open.)


Taking off my Northeast LARP News blogger hat for a moment, and putting on my Intercon M Precon Chair hat, and quoting myself from the Precon schedule...

We've got an exciting slate of panels we're working on [in addition to the already-scheduled panels -ed.], and we're soliciting panelists! If you're interested in talking about...

• Writing Blurbs (aka "Your Blurb is Bad and You Should Feel Bad")
• "Boxing" a Game
• Stage & Fashion Makeup for LARP
• Basic LARP Design Tools (plot maps, brainstorming, diagramming, pacing timelines)
• Mechanics: What, When, Why, How to Design Them
• Gender and LARP
• Sexuality and LARP
• Creating a Community LARP Storage Closet and Database
• Kriegspiel: Wargames in LARP
• GMing with a Team and Staying Friends
• Information: How to Make It Flow, Control, and Track It
• High-Immersion LARP: Whately
• How to Run a Game Briefing/Wrap
• LARP in Education
• What Boffer LARP Can Teach Intercon
• Casting Your Game
• Combat/Conflict or Narrative?
• Intercon 101, or, Getting the Most Out of Your Intercon Experience (scheduled for 5p Friday)

...then you should fill out the Precon Panelist Application survey with your interests and availability so we can schedule the panels appropriately!

If you're interested in attending any of these panels, or the events below we've already scheduled, you should make plans to come to Precon!

The deadline is Thursday, December 20, one week after game sign-ups are fully open.

Already scheduled are:

• Jam and the Craft of Larp Manufacture -- Tony Mitton and Aaron Vanek debate whether LARPs are art.
• GMs are Bastards -- Sue Lee presents the sequel to Tony's "Players are Scum".
• Introduction to Nordic Larp -- Lizzie Stark and friends bring us a primer on the larp tradition we've all heard so much about (it's not just Jeepform!).
• Ars Amandi Presentation and Workshop -- Lizzie Stark reprises her workshop covering a technique for mechanicking physical intimacy in larp.
• Intercon 101 -- If it's your first or second year at the con, we'll talk about some strategies for getting the most out of your Intercon experience. (It's more than just 5-2-1!) (Although this is already scheduled, we're still looking for panelists for this.)
• EDIT 2012-11-05 16:56: We're also hosting an "Introductory Dance for LARP" workshop which I inexcusably left off the schedule until now due to an attack of brain-pixies. Come find out what to do in a LARP when the music starts and your partner bats their eyes at you!

We've got a couple other things in the works, including a panel on what Bidcomm is looking for in LARP bids for Intercon.

And, if you're interested in running something not listed here, please e-mail me at precon@intercon-m.org.

It is, I hope, going to be a really good Precon. If you're at all interested in any of these topics, you should plan to attend!

Intercon Schedule and Sign-Up Information Announced

From the Intercon M newsletter:

Schedule of Games

The Intercon schedule of games is now live! Begin planning your weekend now at http://www.interactiveliterature.org/M/Schedule.php

Game Sign-Ups
Game sign-ups this year will be staggered over three weeks as usual, but switching day of the week each time.

• 7pm Tuesday, November 27, registered attendees will be able to sign up for one game.
• 7pm Wednesday, December 5, registered attendees will be able to sign up for a second game.
• 7pm Thursday, December 13, registered attendees will have no limit on sign-ups!

Precon
The preliminary Precon schedule is up on the web site at http://interactiveliterature.org/M/Thursday.php. Lizzie Stark returns with her Ars Amandi workshop and an Introduction to Nordic Larp (it's more than just Jeepform!); Sue Lee continues Tony Mitton's "Players are Scum" with "GMs are Bastards"; and Tony himself brings us a discussion of whether LARPs are art, and why anyone should care.

We're also hosting an Intercon 101 panel on Friday at 5p, so if you're new to the con or have only recently joined our community, even if you can't come for all of Precon, show up a little early and drop in for some pointers on getting the most out of your experience. (Don't worry, you'll still have time to eat and change before your Friday evening game.)

Through discussion with the community and our own fevered imaginings, we've come up with a slate of panels, and we're actively recruiting panelists! If you're interested in talking about what Intercon games can learn from boffer LARPs, the intersection of gender and LARP, or a number of other topics, please fill out the survey at this link with your interests and availability!

Iron GM
Intercon M will be running an Iron GM competition! Up to four GM teams of one to four people will have 24 hours to write a game containing three secret elements. Players will play your game at Intercon on Sunday morning. Games will be judged, and the winning GM team will receive a cash prize! Please see the Iron GM page for more details.

Get a Room!
Have you reserved your hotel room yet? Call the Chelmsford Radisson at (978)256-0800 to reserve a room now. The group code is "Intercon." More information is available on our hotel page.

Game bids still wanted!
While the M game schedule looks awesome, we are still accepting game bids, especially for Saturday and Sunday mornings. Head on over to our bid form to bid a game!

Intercon M is March 1-3, 2013 (with Precon beginning February 28, 2013) at the Radisson Hotel and Suites in Chelmsford, MA.

Help Wizards & Warriors Spread Youth Larp Camps!

From an article on Wired's GeekDad blog:

If you’re an adult who knows about the power and fun of larping (live-action role-playing), then you’ll want to pass that experience on to your kids. But perhaps there’s no organization offering larping for young people in your community. Guard Up! wants to change that.

Guard Up!, based in Burlington, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, is raising funds via a Kickstarter campaign to create a license for their youth program called "Wizards & Warriors." The licensing program would allow activity providers anywhere, such as recreation centers, martial arts schools, fencing clubs, after-school groups, gyms, and fitness centers with youth programs, to run weekly adventures and monthly events using their game system.

Guard Up! currently runs overnight and day camps using the system as Wizards & Warriors Summer Camp at several campgrounds in the Boston area, and they'd like to let others do the same.

From the Kickstarter:

We already have a good chunk of our start-up content... it just needs some final assembly and polishing. We also have the License agreement completed. We are testing an online repository system as we write this. And we are already play testing additional curriculum.

So your money will be for helping us shoot more How-to videos and developing additional written and visual content as well as helping us to upload all of this content into an online repository (which charges us a substantial annual fee). This will let us meet our January 2013 release deadline – which happens to be the best time of year for adventure enrollment.

The Kickstarter page has a nice list of the things licensees receive as part of the license. (Also, some of the Kickstarter reward levels include personal access to sword training videos, which might be useful if your boffer form, like mine, could most politely be described as "enthusiastic but not very effective".)

The project closes on Tuesday, October 30. As of this writing, they're about 60% of the way to full funding!


(Also, holy cow that's an awesome spot from NECN in the YouTube video up top. "From the battlefield to the boardroom," indeed. There's one news organization that Gets It. Props to them.)

Humans vs. Zombies Run in DC Nov. 3

There's a Humans vs. Zombies game on Saturday, November 3 at 2p in Washington, DC's Fort Reno Park. (It's using the Reddit rules -- apparently this is a thing?) Details are on the Meetup page. As with most Meetups, it's open to the public.

(h/t Christopher Amherst on the International Larp Academia mailing list)

Haunted Higgins (with Monster-Hunting Class)!

The Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, MA is hosting a haunted house event from 11 AM to 3 PM this Saturday, October 27, complete with a workshop for the aspiring Van Helsings in your family:

Monster Hunting, Medieval Style
12:30 pm - 1:15 pm

Zombies are a relatively new threat to the world, but Vampires & Werewolves have been around for centuries. Learn how to fight them off using just a sword or dagger in this fun-filled drop-in workshop!

Class is open to age 14 and up, or age 10 if accompanied by a participating parent. Space is limited. No experience is needed and all equipment is supplied. Workshop participants are advised to wear comfortable clothing with long pants and athletic footgear. All participants must fill out a waiver and participants under 18 will need to have this waiver signed by a parent or legal guardian. For questions or to pre-register, please contact Nancy Huntington at (508) 853-6015, ext. 23, or nhuntington@higgins.org.

COST:
$10 per person

RESERVATIONS REQUIRED:
No

Five Things Make a Post

Occasionally I open something in a tab, meaning to do a post about it, and then forget about it for a while. (In one case, over a month. Oops.) This is me, cleaning out a bunch of tabs. Some of these aren't really events, or necessarily related to the Northeast, but I think they're interesting, so what the heck.

1. SLAW is next weekend at WPI! [Correction! SLAW is TWO weekends from this upcoming weekend, ie. Nov. 9-11. My apologies. -ed.] There are still games with openings on the schedule! (Also if you're five deep on a waitlist, now's the time to consider switching to a different game.)
   
2. Lizzie Stark posts her own reactions to Mad About the Boy and links to others'.
   
3. Norper has some thoughts on the differences between Nordic freeform and US indie tabletop games.
   
4. There's a "Zombie Infested Obstacle Course" in Maryland this Saturday and Sunday, but registration is closed. (Apparently this is a 5K run where people dressed as zombies come chase you and scare you into running faster. Works for me!)
   
5. Watch this man destroy a car with a giant flaming sword:
   
   
   
   (The intro's a bit long, skip to 0:40 for the carnage.)
   
   It's a long story how this happened, but the filming of this involved your humble correspondent standing on top of a ladder with no support for the pivotal scene where the car runs into the stump. And filming from inside the car when the sword comes through the window. I didn't end up with too many bruises!
   
   Also it's totally LARP-related because the form he signs is actually a Legends waiver form, that having been one of the top Google image hits for "waiver form". Really. *nods seriously*