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
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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).