Vale LARP and Nodes

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I ramble about Vale on the blog quite a lot, it's kind of hard to explain LARP to someone it's much more about being there than talking about it. I've talked about nodes and games and so on but here is the crux of the whole thing. Vale LRP is played in the vast 170 Acre site of Huntely Wood, it's a former quarry so it has woods, lakes and some serious slopes. There are two camps for two different sides of a war, the shortest route between the two camps is 1km, the long path between the camps is 2km and you can extend that exponentially if you go down all the side paths.


Out in the Vale are a bunch of different 'nodes'. These strong boxes contain game items that can be collected at various points throughout the day. This is intended to encourage groups from both sides to wander around the site and potentially bump into each other and ultimately fight over the prizes. Each section of the node is locked with a combination padlock and can only be unlocked with the right code.


Last year I made some devices that release the padlock number at a specific time, these could be loaded with a whole weekend of numbers and alleviated all the manual effort of giving out numbers at the right times. This year the number system was changed to put different numbers on each node and also to give out the numbers at the nodes. This means people have to wait out in the Vale for the numbers to appear rather than waiting in camp and trying to run to the node fastest.

The next post is going to be about the new number displays and the complications that went along with them.

If anybody would like to come along to an event then I would be happy to help set that up. New players get a very reasonable rate and I can easily put together some costume bits for you.

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