I hope you all have good weeks and are kind to yourselves.
❗ Announcements ❗
🗳 Please Buy Membership Before the AGM!
- 📆 Friday 24th February (Week 7)
- 🕙 7-9pm
- 🗺 B2.02
To reiterate once more, we need quorum for all AGM votes in order for the soc to keep existing so please do get membership (as you can only stand for positions or vote if you are a member) and come along to the AGM.
If you want to vote at our AGM you will now need to have membership by 12pm (midday) Saturday 11th February.
Additionally, once you have membership, you'll need to verify your membership on our website before you can vote, following these steps:
- Login to your account
- Go to your profile
- Click "Verify Membership" and follow the steps there
If you've already voted on the website before, there's no need to do it again, but anyone who wants to vote for the first time, it's really important that you do this.
Please make sure you verify your membership and turn up to stand/vote at the AGM, it's really important that we have as many people as possible, so the next exec can continue making the society a great place for everyone!
‼️ Spotlight on...
LARP REP
Ahoy there! Matthew here to tell you about being LARP rep. The main responsibility of the LARP rep is of course to run our weekly LARP session. This entails helping to teach new players how to LARP and explaining the rules, organising the monsters and plot for each session, and keeping track of downtimes between sessions. You are also responsible for the ongoing story of each year's LARP, as well as occasionally editing the rulebook and setting. It's essentially like being a GM, but for LARP.
In addition to the weekly session, the LARP rep is responsible for running extra LARP events, such as murder mysteries. If this seems overwhelming, don't worry. The main requirement of being the LARP rep is an ability to work together with other exec, experienced LARP attendees, and most importantly the Quartermaster. Speaking of whom, I'll now pass over to my
comedy sidekickvalued collegue Nathan to explain that role…
QUARTERMASTER
"How dare 😠 , that's Mr
comedy sidekickvalued colleague to you,unarmed sidekickvalued colleague LARP rep.Anyway, Hello! I'm Nathan, and I'm here to tell you about being Quartermaster. If you are interested in LARP but want to take a more supportive role or have an interest in the equipment side of LARP the Quartermaster Exec role is for you.
You’ll be looking after the pointies you can’t poke with and the pointies you can poke with (note: none of our weapons are stab safe ). This involves repair work, repainting work of old weapons and disposing of things that are no longer larp safe (can't have a first aid issue
pls our first aiders need sleep, not paper work).In addition to this you are responsible for assisting the LARP rep in running the weekly session and occasionally running plots when they are not available. Alongside this there is also helping with running extra non weekly events such as murder mysteries or whatever else the LARP rep and you come up with.
Finally a reminder that the other exec are always there to help you out as long as you are willing to work together with them.
CCGs REP
Hi! I'm sophie, the current CCGs rep, here to encourage you to apply. The main role of CCGs is running the weekly event on Thursdays, which involves setting up the room, taking out and managing our supply of equipment, and ensuring everything runs smoothly and people can find games or get introduced. You don't need to play multiple card games, but you definitely need to be open to trying new ones that new players are interested in, and encourage our non-Magic communities.
While the Magic players are the largest group of CCG players in the society, we have a strong Netrunner and YuGiOh! presence also that you'll need to maintain, encourage, and support regardless of whether you play the games yourself. It's also your responsibility to manage the faction budget, which is typically spent on preconstructed materials we bring out each week to make play easier for everyone - we have preconstructed Commander decks, multiple boxes of Netrunner tokens, a set of YuGiOh! draft boxes, introductory Flesh and Blood decks, and so on. You'll need to work out what the society can and should acquire to help our large playerbase thrive.
Lastly, you'll want to look at running events, or for games you're less familiar with, helping members of those communities run events. Tournaments, leagues, and weird formats are a great way to break up the usual weekly play, and you'll want to look into running those when there's sufficient interest.
If you've got any questions you can find me on discord (@lucy/sophie (CCGs)) or at our weekly CCGs event.
RPGs REP
Hi there everyone, Ben here to tell you all about being the RPGs rep here at the society.
RPGs Rep is one of the most unique roles in the society, because you don't have a weekly event to organise and run like the other faction reps. Instead, you have to coordinate and manage all of the various Role Playing Games that are being run through the society. This means that you book rooms, assign rooms and juggle a lot of spreadsheets, as well as managing the inventory of RPGs that the society has available for loans.
As well as this, you get to organise fun events! Intro to RPGs, the Big RPG and anything else you can come up with that is to do with RPGs are entirely within your wheelhouse.
It's been an absolute blast being your RPGs rep this year, and I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have over DM (
Nasenbaer23#8574)!
📅 Strike changes to calendar
This week there are UCU strikes on Thursday 9th and Friday 10th so we've accordingly altered our schedule to move CCGs, which normally runs on Thursday, to Tuesday 7th from 6-10pm, coinciding with our weekly Draft event in B2.02.
🦔 How Wanderhome Went
The Big RPG was a fantastic success this weekend with 30 or so players taking to Hæth and creating wild, silly, and interesting places and stories across the land.
Each table created their characters and their first location, according to the mechanics in the game. We then resolved any conflicts that we had devised (ranging from things such as destroying the turnip economy to helping save kidnapped kith) before swiftly moving on to the next location on our journey - which was the location created by a table adjacent.
We continued in this way, building both metaphorically and physically upon previous story elements in each location.
Seeing as I write the newsletter and not at all because I forgot to take notes at the end when all the flash cards detailing the highlights of the locations’ stories were read out I get to share my favourite part of the game which was Flob. Flob is a lonely fish demon discovered by Slate (sie/it) in the semi-submerged darkness of a secret part of a ruined monastery that features partially destroyed statues to an ancient god of war. Slate offered Flob (who, by the way, communicated their name to Slate via telepathically repeating the word “Flob”) a piece of food and as it blinked Flob had grown bigger and the morsel of food had disappeared without sie feeling anything. Naturally our party (AKA the Bug Brigade) brought Flob to the next location where they ate all the fish in DJ Ungleskog's pool and grew enormous. We resolved this by inventing Flob tourism and also by discovering that when squished, Flob splits into two smaller Flobs, who could be removed from the havoc they'd wrought on the ecosystem. (Ty to Anakin for the wonderful drawing of Flob).
It was super fun to see so many people at the Big RPG on Sunday - thanks everyone who turned up and I hope you all had an awesome time!
Enormous thanks to Ben and Alonso for running the event, it was so much fun and the work you put in is incredibly appreciated!
❔ What's happening this week? ❔
- Monday 5-10pm: In Person Wargames - B2.01 and B2.02
- Tuesday 6-10pm: In Person Draft - B2.02 - set - £Money - you must sign up here to take part + In Person CCGs
- Wednesday 2-10pm: In Person Board Games - B2.02 and B2.04/5
- Sunday 12-5pm: LARP - B2.02
Remember, you can always find an up-to-date timetable of what's going on on our website's Schedule page, and you can see special events (including RPGs) and sign up to them via our Events page.
💭 What happened last week? 💭
Highlight from Jon's Lancer campaign:
Our party of resistance fighters is camped out in a semi-ruined part of the city, and SecCom know this. Their response was to send a pair of bombers to carpet-bomb the area and flush us out, while mechs on the ground overrun us.
Our response was a mix of flying and teleporting up to the bombers, hijacking them, and are in the process of turning them back on SecCom, with one still in the air, and the other crashed into their barracks (continuing next week). On the ground, their forces have been semi-repelled succesfully, including trolling a knightly dude by hijacking his steed's movement repeatedly to make him walk into puddles of acid.
Last week in LARP:
The political situation the players are navigating grows ever more precarious by the week. After learning a lot of fun/useless/worrying info about the wild world of organised philosophy and religion as they journeyed into Annd, the headquarters of the Grand Congregation, the party made the less immediately profitable but probably safer and more morally justifiable decision to avoid assassinating a seer as part of a cutthroat political power struggle.
Extra Bonus End Bit
We have some sci-fi in this week’s roll table, as a treat. I saw all of these things looking at some space BS and was absolutely floored to discover that they are legit science terms(TM) when they are all so clearly things you would ask a space barista to add to your space coffee:
- Quantum foam - the tiniest, fizziest bubbles that may or may not get served on your drink and that may or may not numb your mouth.
- Galactic filament - a straw/light/tiny drink umbrella. Innovation at its finest. Can and will stab and electrocute you.
- Hourglass nebula - this is a type of vessel you can ask to have your coffee served in. It revolves slowly but constantly, allowing you to drink only a tiny bit at any given time.
- Oort cloud - the spongiest marshmallows, made of the dreams of the Oort, who gift them freely. Highly prized amongst hot chocolate connoisseurs.
(I forgot that I said I'd do more festivals this week so I'll do them next week instead)
Wash your hands, stay safe, and come play some games with us 💚
Lils (he/they, Communications and Operations, mostly soup, partially stars)
@ArtemisForest#9741 on Discord
📰 Subscribe to this newsletter!
🌍 Society Website | 📘 Society Facebook Page | 💬 Society Discord Server Shortlink: xdDZnYQ
We're sponsored by Zatu Games!
Use the code WTGRS5 at the checkout to get 5% off your purchase!