Catch-up

[oloriel]

conuly posed this question a while ago, and today it hit me, too.

The weather forecast said, there will be showers of rain from 7 pm onwards.

The first warning drops fell at 7:08, the actual shower came two minutes later.

Now admittedly it stopped raining after another three or four minutes, and there have been no further showers ever since. But still. Weather forecast that's accurate to the point of a few minutes - when did that happen? When did weather forecasts stop being, more or less, wild guesswork and start being reliable? Because it's obviously happened (this is just one example) and I somehow missed the point at which it shifted. Back in the old days it was all "Tomorrow will be nice and sunny" and tomorrow was miserably rainy, and now it's all "There will be rain after 7pm" and the rain comes at 7:08.

Bzuh.

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Although the shower was only very brief, it made us stop working (the pigsty is getting a new roof, and I finished turning the garden from wilderness into... well... garden the past weekend: I should take photos before it's all overgrown again. BABY LUPINES!) so I am still awake enough to deal with the long-overdue backlog of things I should've written about. I'll start in reverted chronological order, i.e. Rohan-LARP first, then Cambridge, then Namibia/ South Africa, because that way I'll start with the easiest and end with the longest. Reading list for March (and February, because I am a forgetful chronicler) will be put somewhere in between.

So for now, have a short (only 3 pages in word) summary of this year's adventures in Rohan.



This year the old chestnut of the LARP – that the most gratifying characters to play are the lowly ones, the kitchen maids, scullery boys and stable hands – was especially true. It always is a good part: You always have something to do, you can go anywhere with the excuse of having to refill the water jugs or to sweep a floor, overhear everything, gossip to your heart’s delight, and you don’t have to deal with all the diplomatic niceties and difficulties. And there were a lot of those this time, for Hafoc, King of Rohan since last year (329 F.A.), has chosen to marry a Haradril, and we can all imagine what people are going to say about that. (It’s astonishing enough that Hafoc has, now that he’s king, decided to be monogamous; there’s a reason why they call him the Father of his People…)

So this LARP was about the wedding celebrations, but if you think that just means a nice party LARP you know little about the twisted minds of gamemasters. Ashraf, the future queen, has of course family in Harad that must attend the wedding; our friendly neighbour to the South-east has sent a cohort of rangers to watch the proceedings, naturally a little nervous that their dear ally choses to tie itself to their former enemy. That in itself would offer ample opportunities for trouble; along with secret plots, Gondorian terrorists, Rohirric traditionalists and just people in general the whole thing needs just a tiny push to end in disaster. There are a lot of such pushes, so many that at some point you wonder whether the GM can’t just leave things alone without ruining a perfectly nice diplomatic solution because they have yet another conspiracy plot. (Although it seems that not all bad news were GM-produced; as per usual, there also was a lot of fruitful miscommunication. There’s a reason why the Grey Camp’s motto at the past Drachenfest was com-mu-ni-ca-tion…)

But we lowly people in the kitchens and stables have a lot of fun. There’s stuck-up Haradrim to poke fun at, and rangers to flirt with; there’s rumours to exchange and the King’s right hand to hate, and meals (with lots of garlic) to cook. And of course there is always cake…
The first day of arguments, hurt feelings and diplomacy culminates in a meal where the High Table sits in icy silence while at the foot end the servants are growing increasingly amused. The alcoholic properties of apple juice (yes, just juice – with water – no cidre!) should not be underestimated. In the end the bride-to-be’s family talks the King into a kind of contest, and he has to dance (Hafoc hates dancing) and compete in archery and chess (at which he’s quite competent).

The next day brings – besides the archery and chess contest – more arguments and more diplomacy while we prepare the feast for the wedding, gather green stuff for decoration, and enter into open enmity with Sir Ulric*, the King’s right hand, who behaves even worse than last year. I really admire his player’s patience; if my character were so universally hated, I’d break down after half a day, I think. Then the castle is open for “civil” visitors (as always on a month’s first Saturday; I really don’t know why we didn’t learn from last year, even though the visitors are less persistent this time) and Lundin and I use the chance to disappear into the forest with our recorders. We’re both too shy to play in front of an actual audience, but in the wood there’s just birds to hear our ill notes, so everything’s shiny, right? Except that the rangers also disappeared into the forest and soon flock around us to listen. I assume it cannot have been too bad; if it had been, they’d probably not stayed for so long.
“Just a short guided tour”, the castle’s owner told us, but of course it takes way longer than planned again. And we still have to decorate the main hall! When we finally get there, half the plants we gathered look a bit limp. But with the help of a lot of small plates of water and some tricky ivy-winding we manage to have it look reasonably well, considering none of us is a florist or interior decorator. By the time we’re done, the noble folks are done with their hairdos as well. We almost end in hysterics when Selimahr, an especially stuck-up Haradan, marches by with a mighty headdress made of brown feathers. Henceforth he is known as Dances-with-chicken.

The wedding ceremony (with belated arrival of the bride; why is that familiar?) is very nice. I almost squeal when I hear that they have included the “…or the world end” formula in the vows. Fortunately my character is not as opposed to the King marrying a stranger as most of the others – Ashraf is a nice person, and if she moves away from her uncivilised desert country to Rohan, Bestest Place In The World, well good for her – so I can enjoy the whole ceremony. Only thing to ruin the solemnities are the storm lamps Sir Ulric lit well in advance, which have begun to give up smelly smoke, making one of the poor rangers (the one that’s been trying to get my character to learn reading and writing) almost suffocate.

The feast consist of both Rohirric and Haradric dishes (or what we down in the kitchen think are Haradric dishes), and although some of the dishes have cooled more than they should’ve, it’s quite good. Even the Haradrim eat cheerfully (yesterday they didn’t) and offer a kind of truce to the rangers so the wedding can be celebrated in relative peace. Two of them try to learn Rohirric dances, another plays at dice with Soldread –
right! Soldread! He deserves a paragraph of his own. Soldread is played by a real kid (ZOMG HOW EXOTIC), one of a set of twins (and his three older siblings happen to be triplets – what a family!). Most of us were a little sceptic when we heard that a 13-year old kid would come along, but actually he’s an awesome roleplayer (well figures, he’s a lot closer to playing make-believe than any of us) and a brilliant kid, too. But he seems to have awesome parents, too. After having been taken along to a Medieval Market by his neighbours he wanted to have a fur. So what did they do? Call the local huntsman to ask whether he’d shot anything with a nice fur recently. So they got the fur of a great boar – but of course it was entirely untanned. and they got themselves tanning instructions on the internet and tried to tan the fur themselves. I can only guess how disgusting that must have been. Something went wrong, and in the end they bought another fur and had it tanned professionally, but the mere fact that they tried that! When I was 12 or 13, I wanted a fur too. Nothing fancy, just one of those sheepskin rugs you get at, for example, IKEA. “No,” quoth my mother, “we had one of those and you fell over it when you were four and almost lost an eye.”
…

Anyway! Back on topic. The evening goes by peacefully and pleasantly, but in the next morning there’s bad news – a letter which apparently says (I only heard rumours, you see) that there were skirmishes on the border between Rohan and Harad because a Haradric tribe was murdered by (supposedly) Gondorian soldiers. The fractions attending the feast go mad, of course, and there’s a secret council. We’re not even allowed to go in to refill the water jugs. Stupid Sir Ulric. We try to listen on the door, but we don’t hear much in the first place, and after a while Sir Ulric comes and tells us off for making an already precarious situation worse with our nosiness, oh yes, how they’re all trying to prevent a war here. Certainly we don’t want a war?

We don’t, no, but he’s a warrior; he probably does. (“Perhaps he’ll fall?” someone suggests hopefully.) By some amazing feats of diplomacy, however, our king manages not to promise either fraction his support, so we get to be a kind of neutral zone – until we know what really happened, at least. Hedelind (my character) is once more convinced that reading and writing only leads to trouble – without that stupid letter, we’d all still be happy…

And on that cheerful note the LARP ends. To be continued next year…



*No relation to Heath Ledger. In fact, Sir is probably the wrong translation of Herr in this context, but Mister sounds inappropriate as well.

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My photos are here, but Beleg made more and better ones.
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In other news, I had to get a book for a class I'm taking this year, and since Amazon is currently a no-go, I figured I might as well buy it at the university bookstore (which actually has the books we need for the semester, whereas I'd probably have had to order it at any other bookstore). So I got the book (first in line of all the others who surprisingly got accepted into that class as well) at the price of € 23,-.
Just out of curiosity I went to check what it would've costed via Amazon.de, and fully expected to be frustrated.
But contrariwise! Amazon.de wanted € 28,-.
HAH.
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