5 Essentials for Winter LRPing

The person most invested in me being warm and comfortable is me. Usually this means remembering to eat and drink, and making sure I sleep occasionally. However  I spend a lot of time camping and as a result now have reasonably good kit for camping in cold weather.

Below are a few of my favourite things for keeping warm in winter.

Snow boots.

I have several pairs of these but the best are a £30 pair from Decathlon. They have lasted me for three years so far and only needed re-waterproofing this year. They’re comfortable and as a bonus I use them as slippers as well.

They look good for sci-fi stuff and are inoffensive for fantasy events as well. My feet get cold and I live in these in winter.

British Army Arctic Sleeping Bag

I bought this just before the first Empire event and have never regretted it. In winter I occasionally need to zip it up and in summer it works even without a rollmat (not my preferred method of using it, but I forgot one and only noticed at 3am). You can get a liner for them as well. These don’t last forever. I’ll need to replace mine next year I suspect. They’re not ridiculously expensive and they do make events a lot nicer.

Fishing bed

Some of you will have seen our camp beds. They’re another luxury and we mean it when we say they’re more comfortable than our beds at home. I wouldn’t buy a cheap one. Ours were over £100 but they’ve lasted over 8 years of rough treatment so far. We’ve got a couple of others that only have two pairs of legs. They’re not so good. Slight tendency to tip sleeping people out in the middle of the night. They take up a lot of car room, but we mostly travel with vans now. They’ve seen both Wookie and I through some fairly major back problems. If you’ve got a small 1-2 person tent you may struggle to fit one in. We buy tents to fit the beds now. (Ed. The bed above isn’t the exact ones that Leah and Wookie use, but they’re all fairly similar.)

Lined trousers

The workshop gets a bit chilly in winter so I actually own these for that. However, they’re also really nice for events I’m crewing when I don’t need to be in kit. They’re also inoffensive enough that I can wear them under fantasy stuff in winter for added warmth when kit is costume and doesn’t keep me warm enough. I usually have 3-4 pairs of lined Craghoppers (I tend to get the Basecamp* ones). They got up to size 20 for women and are fairly robust. I pay about £20 a pair and then destroy them, but they’re something I need for work.

Padded hi-vis overalls

For some events you can get away with wearing kit that’s designed to keep you warm. I signed up for an event with not much indoors in December and concluded that warm waterproof kit was the way forward. This worked quite well. It was comfy enough to sleep in, waterproof and covered in UV paint. It obviously wouldn’t work for a fantasy event, but it worked fine for the event I was at. (Ed. Again, not the same set that Leah owns, but you get the idea!)