Greetings, RFR!
It’s been a while. Hope everyone is holding together. I wanted to update you broadly on the state of Red Feather Roleplaying and what the board has been up to during covid.
First off: yes, we still exist! We’ve been quiet, because, well, no larps to run, but we’ve been having our twice-yearly board meetings throughout the pandemic. We’ve discussed how to hold larps safely while the world recovers from covid. We’ve discussed diversity, equity, and inclusion in terms of where we stand and where, and how, we can improve. We’ve discussed our financial state, and plans for the Fall. More details about these topics will be posted in the following days, weeks, and months.
Financially, we are healthy. A big thank you to the incredible generosity of this community: as covid was breaking out in early 2020, many of you chose to donate your Spring registration fees to ensure that we could offset camp rental deposits and storage costs, and as a result of that, we are in a good state to weather out the rest of this pandemic. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who helped out.
The board and the game directors have also been discussing plans for the fall season. Please see Beth’s post yesterday, and Brian’s post later today, on the Witchwood and Port Katherine messageboards. We have of course been discussing covid safety (Beth’s post covers some of this for Witchwood), and we will post our policies as they are finalized. I realize that this can be a deeply stressful topic for people, and I know you’d like to have information sooner rather than later. I need to ask for your continued patience as we evaluate the evolving situation and figure out the specifics for how we will return to in-person events.
We have also been discussing how best to identify and address issues surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion. One of the most concrete actions we’ve taken as a result of this discussion has been to hire a professional sensitivity and diversity consultant to read over the Witchwood and Port Katherine rulebooks, culture packets, and other relevant player-facing prose. Many thanks go to Beth Baniszewski for assembling and contacting a list of potential consultants and explaining what we wanted from them, and to Mike Fazzina for getting their resumes so we could choose the most qualified person. We were able to select Dara Crawley, a Licensed Master Social Worker (LMSW), who is not only a professional diversity and writing consultant, but who has experience specifically with role-playing game design. She has been wonderful to work with.
The board received the results of the diversity reading about two weeks ago, and we had a meeting with Dara on May 29 to discuss her reports. We are going to put the documents through a proofreading pass to clean them up, and then post the reports in their entirety so you can read them. The reports were detailed and thoughtful, and pointed us at some specific areas for improvement.
Again, you can expect more posts from us in the weeks and months ahead. In the meantime, here are the dates that we have booked at the camp currently in case you want to pencil them into your schedules (though please note that there is uncertainty about how many of these dates will be truly used, as per Beth and Brian’s posts):
- Sept 3-5 (Witchwood)
- Sept 17-19 (We will likely release this date back to the camp, see Brian’s post later today)
- Oct 1-3 (Witchwood)
- Oct 15-17 (Port Katherine)
How to contact us: If you have any questions about any of the above, or if you want to just say hi, feel free to reach out to me through gchat (joyperkinson at gmail), Facebook messenger, or through the email address rfr-president at googlegroups dot com. Note that we’re gradually migrating over to google groups email addresses because they’re a bit more stable than what we used to use. The most up to date email address for our ombudsperson is kep at redfeatherroleplaying dot com (or you can reach out to kep on slack, gchat, or signal), and the google groups email address for the conduct committee is rfr-conduct at googlegroups dot com. We’ll have these, and the other contact addresses, updated on the websites soon. Please note that the president and ombudsperson have both drifted away from Facebook proper, so don’t expect Facebook posts to necessarily reach us.
Finally, I want to give a big thanks to people who have helped keep the hype alive over the pandemic. Beth and the Witchwood staff have put a lot of work into online in-character meetups, including our first ever fully-online event. Brian and the Port Katherine staff put a lot of effort into an extra BGS cycle last year so we could keep game actions going. And of course, all of you have been great at keeping game discussion going on social media. I’m proud to be part of a this community and am looking forward to seeing you again in person as soon as we can do so safely.
Cheers,
Joy Perkinson
President, Red Feather Roleplaying