Back my freshman year at college I stumbled across a bunch of folks hitting each other with foam swords on the UMass Amherst campus. I had done boffer fighting in high school a few times and was happy to find out that there was a group at school that was doing it. I dropped in on a few practices every now and then and before long I was hooked. I didn’t start the Pioneer Valley Combat Club, but for a few years I helped to run the lines, train new fighters, and help the group become one of the most active fight clubs in New England.
Years later, when I had long since graduated and was no longer actively practicing I realized there was something missing in my life. I started driving down to WPI practices to get involved in a practice again, and was able to help a generation of southerners learn the ins and outs of light weapons combat. It wasn’t “my” practice, nor had I started it, but I was able to be a key part of the group. I offered to train anyone that wanted training either in the basics or in advanced weapon styles for as long as they wanted any night I was in attendance. I’m quite proud to say there was rarely a night when I didn’t have any takers, and I trained a lot of young people during the years I was going down to WPI.
When my son started getting older I felt the time it took to go all the way down to Worcester was more than I wanted to commit to. There were a few years when I stopped helping with fight practices. Eventually, I decided to try to get one started in my area, the Merrimack Valley, just south of Salem, NH.
Initially I tried to “get in” at Merrimack College in Andover, MA. It’s a small private college with a very nice campus and it would have been great. I and a few friends reached out to the administration, explained that we were hoping to donate equipment and countless hours to help set up and run a LARP club for their students. We got nowhere. We wrote letters. We met with officials. Ultimately it was a chicken-and-egg situation. If there were students interested, we’d be welcome, but without us being on campus it’d be very difficult to actually get students to try it out. There was an implicit assumption that we must have the financial wherewithal to rent space to do a demo. I don’t think they’d have believed us, or cared, if we were able to convince them we wanted to start up the club out of the goodness of our own hearts with no interest in financial gain whatsoever. We never considered trying to just show up and spar because I just had a feeling that we would be kicked off campus for not belonging there. We weren’t students or alumni, and while the people we met were perfectly nice, I had a gut feeling that some security person would ask if we had ID, figure out we weren’t supposed to be there, and at best ask us nicely to leave.
Our next attempt was to try to run practices in a public park in Methuen. We got some folks showing up semi-regularly, including some very, very good fighters. We also wound up with a ton of 8-12 year olds who were there because their parents were walking the oval walking path that ran around the perimeter of the park. After a few years it became apparent that it was never going to become the kind of practice I was hoping for - one with a steady flow of new members old enough to appreciate the athleticism of the fighting and just maybe able to get themselves to Realms events on their own someday.
Eventually we decided to try again at UMass Lowell. I am a UMass Amherst Alumni and Dave Hayden (Sir Vawn) is a UMass Lowell alumni, so we figured if anyone asked why we were there, it might just work to tell them we’re alums. It’s a public university, and my memory of UMass Amherst was that you could pretty much show up and do whatever you wanted. As long as you weren’t causing problems you would be left alone. This proved to be the case at UMass Lowell as well.
Our game plan was simple, Dave Hayden, Steve Nelson, Mike Labossiere and I just would show up and spar. We would start in late summer because the most important part is having a regular, reliable presence every single week and I didn’t want to miss the first week of school. We would choose a high-visibility location - the grassy area in front of the student union building on south campus. We would always show up on the same night, at the same time. We would bring enough extra weapons so that anyone who wanted to jump in could. It goes without saying that we would be friendly and welcoming to anyone who expressed interest, no matter who or why.
That was three years ago.
The first year we got a bunch of students involved. Some showed a lot of interest, a few showed great potential, and pretty much all had fun. We had relatively small practices and did not list it on the Realms calendar. We got a few of them to an event that year, but we were never able to get indoor space for winter practices. We held workshops during the some of the weeks when practice was impossible and that helped a lot, but it just wasn’t the same as keeping the practice running. When the spring weather got nice enough for us to fight outside summer break was nearly upon us. It was a wonderful start, but the feeling was very much that it petered out and failed to grow as much as we had hoped, in no small part because we lost all our momentum during the winter.
We taught the students about the Realms as best as we could and they decided to form a group - Clan Riverhawk. While some student clubs are heavily guided by their alumni mentors, we chose to have a more hands-off approach. We suggested various ways they could set up an in-character group and explained how WPI and UConn practices operate in slightly different ways in how they handle brining new characters into the Realms environment. Ultimately, we left it up to them. They chose to define themselves as a nomadic clan that held no land and had no ties to any single nation.
In our second year of practice the students were able to get enough student involvement that they formed a student group on campus. This was a huge step forwards, and participation increased that Fall. We had new members show up and become integral parts of the group, and we had first year members who disappeared for various reasons and who were sorely missed.
With an official student group to interact with the administration they were able to secure practice space for the offseason. This was incredibly important, though I think it resulted in fewer workshops that year. The students had developed official heraldry and we made a bunch of shield blanks for them. That year the group was officially introduced to the Realms at Black & White and some of them started making deeper connections into the Realms community.
That year they had a number of highs and lows. They had a someone killed, scalped and left in a bathroom by someone with no real regard for the experience of new players at events. It was a lesson that even great communities can have crappy players who don’t think twice about leaving an overly trusting newbie dead & scalped in a stifling hot bathroom for hours on end at one of their first events. They also had the chance to experience some of the larger events that really show off what the Realms has to offer. At North/South some of them learned how challenging a war event can be, and what a long road the South has to get pack to a position of parity with the North. After Queen of Hearts, one of the Riverhawks told me that event was the epitome of everything they had hoped to experience in a Realms event.
We are now in year three of UMass Lowell practices. For the first two years the practice was not open to the public. I insisted that they only list it on the calendar when they felt they were ready to deal with having outside people at practice. That may not seem like a big deal, but if you are running the practice there can be times when you have to ask people to stop fighting, take a week or two off, or even not come back if they are really taking away from everyone else’s fun (or safety).
While I could have just told them I was listing it on the calendar, and volunteered to deal with problems as they arise, it was important to me that only they do it when they were ready. Lessons in leadership can be demonstrated, but more often than not they must be lived, so I chose not to impose an open practice upon them. I am expecting this year that they will open it up, and there has been talk of holding events on campus, or in the area but hosted by Clan Riverhawk. Again, I am choosing not to spearhead that, as holding an event is a big undertaking and I would not want to shield them from the responsibility when they should be shouldering it and learning from it themselves.
I would love to see more practices spring up around New England and I hope that more players take the initiative to try to start ones up. I would highly recommend getting a few friends together, finding a local public college or university in your area and starting to spar in a location that is hard to miss, but where you won’t be in anyone’s way. Be polite. Be patient. It could take years before your guys have an official club, get themselves to events, or even someday hold an event, but it’s worth it.
Someday we could see a league of a dozen or more college boff clubs spanning New England, visiting each other, holding tourneys and quests and ushering in a new era of LARPing. It will take a lot of time and energy but it is entirely within our reach. It just requires you and your friends to take the initiative to establish a presence at a campus that has never even heard of the Realms.
You can be a guiding hand and a mentor for a generation of young LARPers, and you can help to shape the future of our community and the future of light weapons combat in your area. We were able to do this over the past few years in Lowell, MA. You can do it too.
Find fertile soil.
Plant a seed.
Help it grow.