This weekend was Blackspire’s fall elections for the winter reign. They were held in Iron Keep (Eugene, OR). It was also Collegium, an event dedicated to learning. The kingdom rented out a room at the rec center, as well as the kitchen. There were classes throughout the day as well as battle games ran by Kormac.
I arrived a little late, a bit before 1pm. It’s one of the longer drives to a Blackspire park for me and I left late and stopped for lunch. Kormac was just starting to organize the first battle game of the day as I was garbing up. The game was a capture the flag type game. In this case there were two ways to score a point. One way, and it turned out to be the easiest way, was to carry a heavy object back to your base. The other way was to gather five ping pong balls of the same color and get them back to your base. The heavy object was placed in the middle and the ping pong balls were placed on the opposite sides of the field.
The game lasted for 20 to 30 minutes, and it was a close game. There was a good back and forth and the final score was 2 to 3. You can actual take a look at the first and final round on YouTube. I just created a YouTube Channel for Amtgard and other LARP videos. You can find the channel here. I plan on uploading more videos periodically but I have no plans of doing any actual video blogs.
After the battle game I walked over to the rec hall to check out the classes. I made it a point to watch Terarin’s How to Run a Demo class. I’ve ran a few demos myself, but always at anime cons, never at any other venue so I learned a few new tidbits about running demos in general. I was also remind I have to be enthusiastic when running a demo. He also suggested hamming up some of the combat examples with a bit of theatrics. All good advice. I don’t know the next time I’ll be running a demo but I’m sure to incorporate some of his ideas into my own.
After the class I made my way back to the battlefield to see what was going on. I arrived just in time to see several groups clashing with monsters. It was Kormac’s Wild Hunt quest like battle game. The goal was for your group to gather as many hides as possible. The team with the most hides at the end of the game would be the winners. The game would end when the cockatrice was killed. Kormac only put the cockatrice into play when the game play was slowing down.
I stood next to Kormac and watched him run the game. When a monster was killed several times and all their hides were taken they would come back to the monster station, get assigned a new monster, given some hides and sent back out to fight the players. They were given different motives such as defensive, aggressive and passive.
Overall this game went over pretty well. I think it went on a little longer than I would have chosen, but not by much, maybe five minutes. Kormac was very happy with how the game went and I don’t blame him, it was one of his more complicated designs and it went pretty smoothly. I only heard good things about the game design. I only heard a few people have a bad experience and that was due to players, not to the game design.
Despite the feast being ready to serve in 20 minutes people decided they wanted to play another game. This game was a random class game. Players would go to Kormac, roll a die, and play whichever class they rolled. They were allowed one re-roll. The special bit was that the knight classes were included in this random roll. Some people got to play Paladin and Anti-Paladin.
I didn’t stick around for the game, rather I went to the rec center to get some food. The feast was lasagna, garlic bread and mixed salad. It wasn’t anything special but it was warm, tasty and filling. Joining me at the table was Darb and Morath. Darb got some food while Morath just visited. They invited me to afters at a ramen place and I gladly accepted. I was still hungry.
Before packing up I made sure that there were no awards going out at court since it looked like we were going to be leaving before then. Turns out there weren’t going to be any awards, just a few announcements. So we packed up and headed out.
It was a pretty fun but easy going day. Next week is Pacific War and the anniversary of my 20 years in Amtgard. It should be a blast. I am still tweaking some of my dragon master entries and I still have one to bake. I’ll be trying to do the baking last minute, so probably Wednesday. I hope to see you all there!