Everybody knows that summertime is the dead season for larp. But it’s tough to go through all those months without a single packet to open. That, friends, is why Alleged Entertainment and Paranoid and Crotchety are teaming up to bring you Dia de los Sobres, or the Day of the Envelopes, a doubleheader production offering you two great packet-packed larps on the same day! Alleged’s RESONANCE and P&C’s STARS OVER ATLANTIS will run one after the other on Saturday, July 23rd in Fitchburg, MA.

If you’d like to sign up for one or both of these great larps, click on over to sign up at:
http://journeysurveys.com/answer/312

RESONANCE
By Nat Budin, Susan Weiner, Vito D’Agosta, and Phoebe Roberts
An amnesia and storytelling larp about tragedy, desperation, and the apocalypse.
11AM to 4PM

STARS OVER ATLANTIS
By Liliya Benderskaya and Tory Root
An amnesia LARP about tragedy, sacrifice, death, guilt, karma, love, sex, gender, and forgiveness.
5PM to 10PM

My band, Stranger Ways, played our second gig ever this weekend. We did a joint concert at Arisia 2011, a Boston sci-fi convention, along with our friends Sassafrass, an awesome a capella group. Susan and I estimate we saw about 120 faces there, and if I do say so myself, we rocked them all.

Seriously though, it was an absolutely exhilarating show. It was the day before yesterday and I’m still on a high. The crowd was fantastic, and being up on stage with Sassafrass, doing new supergroup-style arrangements, was truly an honor. YouTube videos coming soon on our band channel!

The concert marked the release of our first album, Strangers at the Gate. We had CDs and download cards available for sale at the show (thanks Vik!) and also at the Foam Brain Games booth in the dealers’ room (thanks Andrew!). And now, we also have it available for purchase at our Bandcamp.com site.

This concludes your irregularly scheduled shameless plug. We now return to blog silence as per standard operating procedure.

Hopefully, we will be putting on the next run of the game in November of this year.  To do that, we’ll need a house to run it in.  If you host the game, you get a guaranteed spot in it as well as a bunch of other goodies!

Interested?  Check out the full post about it at the Alleged Entertainment blog!

Hello LARP fans!  In case you haven’t heard, my fiance Viktoriya and I are writing a LARP called “Harmony Quest.”  This is an experimental game set at a couples counseling retreat.  Most of the game will be spent in group therapy sessions, in which the characters will be trying to work out their relationship issues.

The game design candy here: we’re going to be using real past relationship issues from our players’ lives.  On the casting questionnaire, we ask you to tell us some stories about your past relationships, and we’ll be using them as the basis for characters.  You won’t get the character with your stories – someone else will.

Sound intriguing?  If so, we need players badly! We particularly need males, but we could use more people in general.

If you want to read the blurb, go see Vik’s original post about it on LiveJournal.  Or, to sign up, please fill out our casting questionnaire on Journey.  Thanks!

I’m very excited about having Intercon at the Westin.  It’s an absolutely fantastic space, and as a GM, I’m really looking forward to making use of it.  The function space at the Radisson is great for us, and I can confidently state that the space at the Westin is an improvement on it in every respect.

Even more exciting than the bigger, better function space, though, is the fact that this change lets us grow as a convention.  Last year, at Intercon I, we saw the largest registration numbers for any Intercon convention in history.  Not only did Intercon I break the records, it shattered them – we grew almost 50 attendees; about a fifth of the convention size!  This year  (not surprisingly, given the economy), the numbers are down a little, but they’re much closer to the I numbers than the H ones.  Moving to the Westin will let the convention continue to grow without having to worry about capacity.

Of course, moving to a different hotel comes with some downsides, too, and Chad did a great job covering those in his post as well.

The most important one, in my opinion, is that attending Intercon K will probably end up costing you a bit more than previous Intercons have, due to the fact that we won’t be able to provide meals at the new hotel.  This would have been true with any new hotel, not just the Westin – the deal we have with the Radisson is basically unheard of in the hotel world.  We’re actively looking into ways to keep the costs down for our attendees as much as possible, and we already have a few ideas, but I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes by speculating here.

Finally, I just want to say that I’m immensely honored to be part of the Intercon community.  I often marvel at the fact that not only do I know some of my favorite writers in the world personally, but they’ve played my games too.  We have a truly amazing, participatory LARP culture here, and now we have the opportunity to expand it and share it with even more people.  I won’t lie and say I’m not nervous about the changes ahead – but I know this community can come together and make Intercon K work.

(Click for full size.)

Introducing Journey – online surveys the way they should be. With Journey, creating a survey is simple, flexible, and hassle-free.

After seven weeks of private beta testing, Journey is open for business. I’m proud to be offering straightforward online survey creation for marketers, researchers, and anyone else who just wants answers.

Journey’s launch also marks the start of a new business venture: Sugar Pond. Sugar Pond is a software company dedicated to communication, user empowerment, and community. You can read more about what Sugar Pond stands for in our manifesto.

I really want to thank everyone who’s provided feedback, encouragement, and sage advice these past few months. I’m truly proud to know all of you, and grateful that you’ve helped me get this little project to this point.

Now, I have one more favor to ask of you all: please let people know. The best way to get the word out is to link people to this posting, or to the Journey home page, on your blog, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, or whatever else you use. If you believe Journey can be a success, please help me out by spreading the word about it.

And if you believe Journey could be a success if only I changed that one little thing, I want your honest feedback. Please, always feel free to email me at nat@sugarpond.net with your ideas, suggestions, and complaints. I want to hear from you.

10 Bad LARPs: C-Section is coming. We’re planning on making our debut this winter. But in order to do that, we’ll need your help.

This time, we’re actively soliciting ideas for bad LARPs. Let’s face it, we’ve all had ideas we’ve thought might make a good 10 Bad LARP. If you’d like to submit an idea for 10 Bad LARPs: C-Section, we’d like to have it!

We’ve set up a wiki page to collect ideas. I’d link to it here, but that would probably invite the spambots, and we don’t want that. If you have a bad LARP idea, just comment on this post or send me an email.

We’re having our kickoff meeting for the game on June 21, so please try to get your ideas submitted by then. At the meeting, we’re going to go through the idea list (and possibly brainstorm some more ideas), and pick the ones that will be used in C-Section. If your idea is picked, we’ll let you know, and you’ll get credit for it in the game!

We hope you’re as excited about this game as we are, and we can’t wait to hear your awful, awful ideas.

This is going to be a long engagement – no wedding date yet, and no plans to set one for quite some time.  Since Vik is in school, and has absolutely no free time to be planning a wedding, we figured it would be best to wait on this one.