The butterfly elf

This weekend was my first experience with Live-action-role-playing, or "Lajv" as they say in Sweden. Since I have not yet made the progress in learning Swedish that I would have liked to have done by now, we developed me a character who wasn’t supposed to understand more Swedish than I have already learned. So here follows a description of my character and my understanding of the world in which the game was set:

( very long background )

So: how did the weekend itself go? (and how much can I remember sitting down to type this part a full week later?)

Well, we (lord_kjar, linda_linsefors, her mother, who flew up from the far south of Sweden for the event, and I) managed to arrive on site on Thursday 30 minutes after site opened (which is not bad considering that lord_kjar wound up having to go into work for two hours Thursday morning, despite having booked both Thursday and Friday off, so he had rather less time for packing and organizing than he’d hoped to have that day. After arriving on site we got the full impact between the difference between an SCA event and Lajv.

In the SCA it is normal for camping events to take place in an open field, and one can drive right up to the place where one will be putting one’s pavilion, set it up, unload everything into the pavilion before taking the car away. In Lajv one is camping in the forest. In this case it meant walking about 3/4 of a kilometre to get from the car park to where we were camping. In order to make this possible we did things like hang the pavilion (in its new bag, made special for this event with sturdy handles which go fully across the bottom of the bag and up the sides) from some of the pavilion poles so that it could be carried suspended between two people. It took the four of us (with occasional help from others) two to four trips each to carry our gear out to the camp (and we brought way less gear for the four of us than he and I normally do for SCA events!)

Our camp was only for the Caliquendi (and a human student attached to one of our scouts), so there were about ten of us in our camp, most of whom slept in our pavilion (which, in the game belonged to lord_kjar’s character. The rest of us in the Caliquendi camp were scouts who had their bed rolls tucked under single-person lean-tos.

On Thursday we had just enough time after arriving on site to bring out the pavilion, set it up, and set up the bedding for lord_kjar and I before we had to turn around and do the one hour drive back to town so that we could run the first session of the SCA dance practice held at the University. I had advertised to the student choir we sing in, and one of our members forwarded the information to the Exchange Student facebook group, and, as a result we had two students for the class, plus lord_kjar and I. One of the students comes from Italy, where he does 19th century ball dancing, so I also invited him to join the Swedish Folk dancing. The other comes from France, and sings in our choir this term, too. There were a number of SCA folk who said that they would normally have come to dance, but they didn’t feel they had the time/energy to go out to the Lajv to set up, then come back to town, and then return to the event. Ok, so it was kind of hard for us to do, too, but dancing was fun, and it pleased me to stop by home and grab a shower (felt good after all the sweating we had done carrying pavilion, poles, wooden chests, etc. out to the camp) before heading back to site.

We arrived at the pavilion shortly after our camp had started a meeting in the pavilion to introduce their characters to one another (Thursday was for set up and informational meetings, and we were to start the game in character when waking up on Friday morning), so we participated in that, I did my yoga, and we went to sleep around midnight.
( Friday’s summary, with a diversion of a description of a failed sewing project from the 1980’s that got recycled into something else for this event )

However, after all of that in-game political stuff (and not understanding most of it), I was very tired, so I went to bed at only 21:00 while people sat outside my pavilion and chatted by firelight late into the night.

( Saturday’s summary )

( Sunday's summary )

We set up the pavilion in our yard to dry Monday evening after work and a local friend, who lives in an apartment, came over to do the same with theirs. However, they accidently left their poles at home, so instead we hung it from the rafters inside of our shed to dry there—out of the sun, but neither would it get rained on whilst drying.

Tuesday we had choir, Wednesday I went to dinner with the teacher of the short course that I had arranged for this week for work (and while I was out they took down and put away the pavilion), Thursday was SCA sewing night, and tonight lord_kjar had a work party to attend, so I am finally making time to type up all of the above (well, the part about the history of the world I wrote on Monday, the rest was today). No doubt I have forgotten much that could have been included, but this is already long enough (seven pages in Word) so I had probably better just post it…