[Deptheads] Gateway 2010 Notes

[Ryan McMullan]

Notes from the LARPs:

All in all, this was a good con for LARPs.

Our special event of the Pandemic LARP was lots of fun, well attended (~35)
and was nice because most of the attendees were boardgamers crossing over.
Of course, Tom and his crew put together a very well-thought-out LARP (and
demonstrated just how much prep work goes into making a LARP happen as it
was full of detailed characters, backgrounds, special abilities, puzzles,
equipment, and ways of interacting with the regular Pandemic board).

Our regular event, Dying Kingdoms, has grown huge (over 60 players),
bringing in a large number of its own players to the con (some do
single-event con passes, some stay the weekend), in addition to entertaining
regular con attendees.  The penthouse barroom was perfect and the props and
spreads that they put on (Greek setting complete with Greek food,
decorations, and a hefty supply of togas for folks who didn't have costumes)
really transform their rooms to put on a show and is a great feature for
us.  They also do a tabletop RPG game as a prequel to the LARP which is
mainly attended by players of their regular campaign (about 30 attendees).
This group has supplanted the role the Camarilla used to fill as a group
that single-handedly delivered a big chunk of attendance to the con (that
said, Cam is supposed to return in February).

The AOKP quest event looked good and had decent participation (~25 con
attendees in total) but in general suffers from a lack of niche.  This event
is meant to be played be any con attendee as a series of connected
mini-games that they can join any time between their other games.  When it's
listed next to the rest of the LARPs, folks assume that it's the regular "go
to a room and play a solid game for 4-6 hours" sort of game, so we should
find a different way to list events like this.

The Old School Network (WoD vampire) game didn't really take off.  It's a
new group that doesn't supply their own fan base and they tried to do three
consecutive events, which backfired.  I suspect many folks felt that they
would have to attend all three and so went to none.

Orccon looks like it may be an embarrassment of riches for the LARP dept.
We're supposed to have Camarilla, One World By Night, and Dying Kingdoms
(all large with multiple events), in addition to the smaller LARPs.  Space
might be an issue, but we'll cross that bridge when we get firm commitments.

Ryan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mordred.punk.net/pipermail/deptheads/attachments/20100916/d34440aa/attachment.htm