jducoeur

Time for a quick plug: in a couple of weeks, this year's NELCO -- the New England LARP Conference -- will be running at the Chelmsford Radisson. (Better known to many of you as the site of Intercon.) NELCO is the all-panels cousin to Intercon: where Intercon is the convention *of* LARPs, NELCO is the convention *about* LARP -- the place to discuss writing, designing, costuming and all those useful arts that surround the games themselves. (Along with things like a weekend-long Build Your Own Game track -- if you've never done one of these before, they're a hoot.)

At 1pm on Saturday, I'm going to be doing what amounts to a sneak peek of the current state of Querki, leading up to the Alpha release later in August. Querki was, of course, originally designed for LARP writing -- I wrote the original prototype for my own LARP work ten years or so ago -- and it's still a very good tool for the purpose. My original theory was that I would come to NELCO with a pre-canned LARP-writing schema to show off, but I realized that that's silly: the whole point of Querki is to make it easy to build this stuff. So my current plan is to instead do it as a hands-on workshop -- I'm going to build a LARP-writing Space during the seminar, taking direction from the audience, and answering questions about what Querki does and does not (yet) do.

Later in the afternoon, Nat and I will be doing a compare-and-contrast between Querki and JourneyVellum, his more-established and mature LARP-writing platform; we're hoping to get other folks to talk about other tools they use for writing and designing LARPs as well. I expect to learn a lot, and I think it'll be a fun roundtable. (And will probably give both of us ideas about things we ought to be implementing.)

I know that it's only a week after Pennsic, so a lot of folks will still be decompressing. But if you're into the art and science of LARP, I recommend checking NELCO out. And if you're curious about this stuff I've been talking about for the past year, come check out the Querki panel...