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Why I Want To Go: Rhiassa Presents: Echoes of Ragnarok- Legends by Keith

I have an addictive personality.

When I get into something, I really get into it.  I can be an annoying asshole about it. Ask anyone that skips practice on me when I expect them to be there.

You might not know this about me, but I also play Dungeons and Dragons, once or twice weekly. If I go for a week without really playing it, I start to get cranky about it. I won’t say I go into withdrawals, because that’s a serious real world thing, but I think you can pick up what I’m putting down.

So between practice, and role playing, you can probably see why I’m addicted to this game, and community. But there is more. The most immersive, and memorable moments for me occur around overcoming challenging scenarios. In fighting, that can mean tournaments against foes that I perceive to be at a higher competency or skill level than me, where I win with guile, over luck. But some of my more memorable moments come from questing as well.

Rhiassa presents that sort of questing environment.

The kind of environment where memories will be made, as you come across challenges that make you think. That make you use strategy. That make you fight for your life. Forming and organizing encounters that force us, as players, to use a diverse skill set is something that Rhiassa shines at.

Helping people make memories is something that Rhiassa shines at.

As an editor for the view, with all it’s perks, I get an inside view on the event. Things you might not know from reading the event announcement. You probably pieced together that this event is a questing style dungeon crawl. But from what I gathered, Friday night will center around playing games and learning the legend of Norland’s Sigurd. Saturday Day, will have a theme that seems to be centered around an Escape the Room concept, with a lot of puzzles, and some monsters to fight off, rounding out the day with Sigurd’s tomb, and the things that may lurk within it.

If you know anything about the Norse hero Sigurd, you’ll know there is a lot to work with to make this a really interesting quest, and if it progresses the Ragnarok line forward synergistically, and with all the innovation that Rhiassa is known for, ( editor’s note: it will. ) then you cannot miss this experience.

So come out with me. I’ll be there looking for hints as to how to find a third option for this whole ordeal, where we meet the prophecies of Ragnarok; but we can save the people who are fighting for their lives.

I’ll see you in the dungeon

Keith “Saegan” Cronyn

Arc Sphere Distortions

Arc Sphere Distortions

by Steven "Therian" Matulewicz

10 Questions with an EH - James Murphy

1. What events have you previously thrown?

Tournaments of Respect, April 2003
Light’s Lament, September 2004
Oblation, September 2005
Feast of Blackwood III, September 2012
Feast of Blackwood IV, September 2013
Feast of Blackwood V, September 2014
Festival of Pi(e), March 2015
Monster Island, August 2016
Demonic Invasion 3, August 2017
A Journey to the first tomb of Rathkeal, Party of Chaos, June 2018
Forthcoming:
Demonic Invasion 4, August 2018
Feast of Blackwood IX, September 2018

Not EH credit but wrote/thrown content for
Try to help Sara, September 2002
Something in the woods, August 2003
Trip-ing the gates, April 2005
Convergences, 2013 and 2014

Blade, Nihil, and Boom press forward in a Three-man
fight at Tournaments of Respect, photo by Mike Amend

2. What led you to start throwing events?

Pride, (which goeth before the fall), wanting to throw content, wanting to give back, wanting to be in charge, wanting to show the community that I could be a leader. Most of these reasons were bad. And my early events were bad. If you look at the list above there is a bit of a gap between Oblation and Feast of Blackwood III. It was quite a while before I felt I had the proper reasons for being an EH again.

Bonus question: What led you to start throwing events again?
Blackwood, the Blackwood family led me to start throwing events again. I watched and learned from some of the best event throwers in the game. I saw the mistakes I had made with my early attempts and realized why they did not work. I saw the planning, the preparation, the organization, the ability to delegate, all the things that makes an event great. Without me joining Idaris, I would probably not be throwing content today.

3. What would you like your events to be known for?

Making players make choices, while some of my plots have been pretty straight forward, but most usually have some decision trees in them. I try to have multiple ways of overcoming problems. At Monster Island the final encounter with the demon in the volcano had multiple endings. The one the players chose was not as much of a consequence as I planned for but I rolled with it. I also like to give players a chance to interact with each other in ways that make real differences. Sometimes it works out for the better, sometimes it doesn’t. But that is the way of choices.

An iconic picture from Monster Island by Steve Nelson

4. What aspect of event holding do you consider most challenging?

Delegation. Several people have heard me say something like “if I do it, I know it got done” I am fortunate that I have access to people who are very good at Realms. Prop builders, marshals, den mothers, people who can play any npc role, writers, and hard workers. It took me a long time to go from “if I do it..” to “they can take care of this, I trust them”.
Bonus answer: writing content that I can’t watch.

5. Tell us about an event moment that you are particularly proud of?

I have a few: Preparing 120 pies for Festival of Pi(e), making players walk over a corpse filled valley, after killing hundreds of zombies to fill it in. the unsuccessful attempt at putting the magic item together when the involved players could not agree,  feeling the hate for the rust bug, and when the regenerating orcs became regenerating pigs and a bacon mine was born.

6. Tell us about something that went wrong and what you learned from it.

At Tournaments of Respect (Tournaments of the parking lot, lol), I was the head marshal, MM, den mother, set up person, judge, and single point of failure. I learned it takes a team to do a thing. I also learned that when the site contacts you on a Wednesday before your Saturday event and tells you that you can’t use the sports field, you should cancel your event, not move it to the parking lot. Looking back I know that having it on the field would not have saved that event.

7. What do you think makes an event site “good” and how have you gone about locating sites?

Bathrooms, water, parking, shelter, someplace to store props when they are not needed
I have used sites that others have found before me. I am constantly looking at other sites because one of the things I like to do as a player is going off into the unknown.  I can remember the first times I was in Mines falls, or Andy’s land,  or Abe’s. Later visits usually blend but exploring the unknown is fun.

8. Have you managed to maintain a balanced budget? Any advice for other event holders on doing that?

Is my wife reading this? No?  good. I have never managed a balanced budget, I have never made any profit off an event. The best I think I have come was about 100 down, the worst is about 1000. (Antrim site is expensive).  Realms have been holding weekend long events for a long time with very little increase in price. Other larps charge a lot more. We have always been the homegrown grassroots backyard kind of group. I am not sure how much longer that can last.
Advice to get close? Reuse props, have a theme so that most of your npc garb can be similar or the same. For a long time Blackwood had a lot of undead. So a lot of our encounters had undead in them. We have a demon costume that Dave Hayden? Gave us, I have used it many times.

9. What staff positions do you feel are essential to running your events and what do you do to help empower and support them?

All of them. Every crunchy npc, every MM, every person writing plot, cooking, cleaning, hauling stuff, packing stuff, doing stuff, my art department at home, anyone helping. Without them the event does not go, or does not go as well as it could. It has taken me a long time for me to say to a MM “here is what I am thinking, run with it.” To the person who is putting together the next encounter “here is what I am thinking, run with it”. The way I support them is to give them the idea, and let them run with it. If it did not go as it was written, but players had fun, then it worked. If it didn’t lets have a conversation why.

Making announcements at the Festival of Pi, photo by Dustin Mack

10. What advice do you have for other Event Holders?

Ask for help. Do as much as possible ahead of time, don’t count on free time at the event to finish something up, it does not exist. Have more content then you need; an extra encounter or two, more tournaments, an extra couple boxes of pasta and jars of sauce. And always bring extra socks.

11. What can we look forward to seeing form you in the foreseeable future?

There is Demonic Invasion in August, the rest of the Folkwood events (three/four more this year?). Next year I am also helping some other people in Blackwood to throw an event featuring some of the different provinces/protectorates. This will be kind of a localized convergences thing, (death cows and pirates, o-my).

The View Retrospective - Interview

Scan by Jeremy Grayson. Originally published in The View From Valehaven, 2nd Ed, Volume 3, Issue 5. June 2006.

What You Missed: G.O.F.E.R. T.H.R.E.E.

by Nataliya "Shader" Kostenko

If you missed GOFER 3, you missed a really good time! Shame on you, the quest was only like 3 hours--everyone has time for that. Anyway when the Ashenmark and bros contingent rolled up to the (lovely and friendly) town, there was not only food, drink, and festivity, but also quite a few people looking for our assistance. Baba Yaga was there looking sexy and stylish in her mobile hut, so Asharn and I were (obviously) trying to win her heart. Therefore I mostly missed it when Grindin, Kaelkatar, and Gordon found some dragons in another part of town that “wanted us to seal off some sort of evil so they could protect what was within” (Temorse’s inspired retelling of the request). I guess if dragons wanted us to jump off a cliff, we’d do that too. In fact, not to be a dragon racist, but the only dragon I saw (which was very beautiful, and experty manned by some clearly-heat-impervious NPCs, by the way) was trying to kill us. I don’t trust. More importantly, however, sealing off this evil required breaking into Eagle’s Rook, AKA the domain of the “Ladies Chocolate” AKA Dav Hayden AKA Sir Vawn. So of course I was 100% down to clown. Hopefully, though, we weren’t sealing off the flow of chocolate for the ladies, God forbid. The townsfolk also said something about recovering a lost child, a cursed blade, a cup, etc. We hitched a ride in secretly on a caravan and a couple of different passwords, keys, and combinations later we were in the heart of it fighting the aforementioned dragon and an equally cool hydra. There was also a ravine spider that ripped my two (2) legs off at least 27 times (each). We found A LOT of really nice rocks on the way too, some we had to knock over, some we had to stand back up, some we had to stack together at the bottom of the ravine, some were just there on the ground naturally I think, and one rock in particular was HUGE, had a face, and chased me around SO FAST. Damn yo, in 95 degree heat I’m even slower than a rock. We were so overzealous about all this that when the evil whatever it was got sealed (or unsealed, or some other loud thing happened at the end), we went out on every song and ran all the way to the front door of the dungeon instead of just outta that room. Somewhere along the way Raynor got screwed over and scalped by a (dead?) little girl, and everyone else found some cool loot. Maybe I could keep some if only I wasn’t so behind on my taxes. Upon return to the town I got straight to drinkin’ (surprisingly water, cuz it was so dang hot), but I’m sure someone in our group was a good enough samaritan to return the stuff the friendly townsfolk had wanted to them.

--Shader, over and out

P.S. Temorse’s taxes are too steep, so I can’t really buy you anything nice, but you should call me (crystal ball? Astral project? Whatever the immersion-friendly version of yo’ digits is, gurl), Babushka Yaga! You’re just about old enough for me. ;)

Happy 4th of July!

From all of us here at the View from Valehaven staff, we would like to wish you and your loved ones a happy day of celebration. We will return with our regular content tomorrow!