One Year for Mandalas Minion

It has been a year since I started the blog.

Some people have told me that some of it has been useful. This makes me happy.

We have failed to run Jurassic LRP. People tell me that they are sad about it. I’ve met so many people over the last year who would have been interested if they had known we were doing it and have concluded that the success of an event can be down to something as simple as the way that Facebook chooses to publish it. Some of these were people who were friends of mine but didn’t see the posts.

I know groups of people from a range of different systems brought together by obscure common systems. I thought I knew a lot of UK LRPers and am only slowly becoming aware of quite how many there are that exist in planes of LRP beyond those I frequent. I’m also more aware of the number of people who see the big LRP companies as monoliths, not people. LRP is made almost entirely of people. There is the odd tent and some camp sites, but the irreplaceable bit of the hobby is people. I have a room full of stuff for running events and the bit that I struggle without is the people. With very few exceptions these are volunteers and often utterly exceptional.

I reject the idea that LRP is something I should be at all embarrassed by. Most of my reluctance to talk about it with people (and I’m not very reluctant. It’s one of my favourite topics of conversation) has stemmed from the difficulty of telling people what it is. There are also a myriad of different ways that LRP can be used to help and support people beyond it just actually being fun. It wouldn’t hurt LRP in the UK to be more mainstream. We could say so much more if we didn’t have to spend so long telling people what it is. The people who run LRP at schools and for youth groups are helping us, not just by giving those kids something to do, but by introducing all of the people that interact with those children to the idea of what we do.

So anyway, a year since the blog began and I’m more than happy to continue writing. I’ll continue sharing the particularly interesting bits and hopefully eventually manage to write something that’s vaguely contentious one day, and write a lot of things that people find useful a lot of the time. Nerds who write LRP games like giving advice and I’m one of those.