Role play games update
Off to an amazing start to 2021 for RPGs.
So far we have played Zombie World, Are you my Soul Mate, ‘a fantasy homebrew’, Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, Bride for Dracula and Alice is missing,
Schedules for the next week or two. Fiasco, Fuggetabout it, Alien, Remember Tomorrow and Mothership.
Thats 11 different RPGs in January if not more. We did 16 different RPGs in 2020! 2021 could be amazing
In the Pipe Line we have Mork Bork, Warhammer Goblins and Halloween, Last Fleet (Powered by the Apocalypse) and Parselings and another round of Alien.
What next folks? We’ve updated our tags on here and rearranged discord to make it tidier.
What do you want to run?
What do you want to play?
This image is our 8 month weekly campaign of Warhammer Fantasy Role Play. It features left to right. Halfling Thief / outlaw / Boatman. Human Warden / Hunter. Human Apothecary / Nun of Shallaya, Human Stevedore / Bounty hunter and Halfing Smuggler / Spy / Student.In the background Able the Gravedigger. Image created in Heroforge
2020 look back and 2021 look forward
Happy new year all.
I am going to list some of our achievements but i want to say this first. Everyone who is still here is winning. 2020 has been a hard year, a lot harder for some so please don’t feel bad if you feel like you have not achieved much.I am immensely proud of the HB community / family.
We’ve pushed hard and grown 2020 has shaken us out of our comfort zone. We’ve learned how to play board games and video games online both socially and technology. We’ve kept our amazing friendly culture and welcomes many many new faces.
We’ve empowered encouraged and support people into teaching their first game, playing their first rpg and running their first RPG.I hope our furious busyness has entertained those who haven’t wanted to take part directly.A few stats.We hope a minimum of 1623 smiles across over 200 days!
51 board game sessions
65 Public RPG sessions of 16 different systems by 7 different story tellers
80 Private RPG sessions (atleast!)*
9 video game nights and
2 quiz nights.
That’s 127 free public events up from 30 in 2019! (208 total free events) We’ve entertained around 1137 people up from 694 in 2019 (1623 including private RPGs)We’ve raised £2000 since March (technically down from £3131 in 2019 but that is all online and without the huge MAY day which raised £2245 in 12 hours). £8500 in four and a half yearsBare in mind we only turned it up to 11 In late march, Thats 208 **(ish) days of this year we’ve run something fun and free! Our lending library has gone from 10 items to 150 and be lend out over 120 times.
Thank you all so much for everything you’ve done to help us.Who knows what 2021 will bring, we’ll aim to play once a week, keep on with atleast 2 rpg oneshots. We will restart in person when it is safe to do so and we will continue online to help keep all the wonderful people who can’t get into hereford for what ever reason regulary. I am looking forward to doing another huge charity event wtih 100 plus people and seeing everyone playing games. Please keep sharing and liking our posts and supporting us on social media that is key to share the wonderful hobby
*By private RPG i mean an ongoing campaign with no room for new people to join so exclusive by nature rather than inclusive. There are 4 active campaigns with the close community and 4 outside of that I’ve not counted.** A few days have simultaneous events on
Have a beer and celebrate what ever you hecking can! What was your highlight?
Christmas Eve Gaming and fund raising
We are running a game day on Christmas eve and probably a few more, We’ve lots of role play games onto.
We have raised £580 in December
£1967.31 since lock down
£8500 raised in four years!
£9500 raised in six years!*For Herefordshire Mind
You are awesome thank you so much!
https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/HerefordshireBoardgamers
*the last £1000 was for NSPCC and predates HB, but includes most of the original HB committee.
Raffle and Quiz, huge prize haul
Here is most of our Winter 2020 Spring 2021 prize haul raising money for Herefordshire Mind
Not shown are:
our mugs / coasts.
More snacks for the hamper
3d printed Dice tower
3d printer standard thingy of your choice.
Me running you an rpg or game night.
Signed poster.
Beer
Some of the items have box damage but all are brand new.
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Please use the existing donation page. Any donations from today will be entered as a £2 raffle ticket. Please put Christmas as part of your message. (Technicallly.. you shouldn’t add gift aid, but firstly this is a donation to mind with the small option to win….)Donation links for both below https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/HerefordshireBoardgamers
RAFFLE CLOSES (CLOSES MIDNIGHT 20/12/12)
QUIZ CLOSES 9PM 18/12/12
The quiz is free entry but if you donate atleast £2 you get to enter the prize draw. There will be a prize for the highest score and a few others so everyone stands a chance of winning (if you donate)Prizes will be broken down into lots and the winner picks what they want. We will give away a number of prizes based on the total donations. Left other prizes will be rolled over to future events. An exception to picking your prize is where we have a sell or use by date. Prizes can be posted / possibly delivered we can work out who pays costs.
Please share the heck out of it. This is a huge haul of prizes with a low entry point.The team has worked hard this year and i hope we’ve helped. Let’s give this a huge push to end the year on an amazing story. There are plenty of non gamers prizes so please share this.
I will need to be able to link people’s donations to prizes so please post here if you donate or message me.I would love to raise around £100 to push our post fund covid fund raising to £1500!
Link to the main gallery here https://www.facebook.com/media/set?set=oa.435445474283837&type=3
Winter Event Schedule
In addition to our first Thursday and third Sunday, we are still aiming for weekly main events and on top of that there are lots of extra events from RPGs to Among us nights happening organised by us and the community.
Events:
November
Sunday 15th 3pm to 9pm Game day
Saturday 28th All day charity game day
Thursday the 19th Quiz night
December
Thursday 3rd Games evening
Friday 18th Quiz and Social
Sunday 20th, All day charity game day (from our usual afternoon)
We are most active on Facebook and Discord so do join us there 😀
Board Game library now has 130 games, 13 Puzzles and 2 Role play games
Free to borrow and we can help recommend you titles. We’ve also just had 20 games returned so have lots in stock
https://herefordshireboardgamers.co.uk/library/
General updates, Weekly games nights!
Lots going on, We are still lending games from our library and running weekly game nights. Most of the activity happens on discord and facebook.
We’ve recently run a video game running many brutal sessions of Among us.
We are still working hard at providing lots of free events, please let us know what you want to see and if you want to help us run or support any.
International Virtual / Online Volunteer opportunities
•https://www.onlinevolunteering.org/en -> Site from the UN with a lot of options for volunteering from home
•https://www.helpfromhome.org/ -> Site from the UK with a lot of ideas to volunteer from home.
•https://www.catchafire.org/-> volunteer search tool is exclusively for online volunteer projects.
•https://www.si.edu/volunteer/DigitalVolunteers-> Take on important assignments to expand access to the Smithsonian’s massive collections and participate in a variety of research programs
•https://translatorswithoutborders.org/volunteer/-> For those fluent in more than one language, check out this nonprofit that combines language skills with humanitarian aid.
•https://www.zooniverse.org/-> Zooniverse is a platform for people-powered research that literally wouldn’t be possible (or practical) without the help of online volunteers. Spend as much or as little time as you’d like identifying endangered animals, classifying galaxy systems, or transcribing Shakespearean manuscripts.
•http://www.gutenberg.org/help/new_website.html–> Founded in 1971, this may just be the virtual volunteering effort that started it all. The goal is to create the largest digital library, and so far they’ve amassed 59,000 free eBooks. Volunteer by donating eligible materials, transcribing books into a digital form, or proofreading others’ work.
•https://www.dosomething.org/us–> DoSomething empowers young people to enact social change both online or off. Volunteer online through one of our campaigns to help solve real-world problems.
•https://www.bemyeyes.com/ -> Download the app and help bring sight to blind and low-vision people. Be My Eyes is a free app that connects blind and low-vision people with sighted volunteers and company representatives for visual assistance through a live video call.
•https://ebird.org/home–> Track bird populations.
•https://www.chemoangels.com/angel-pre-app–> Send a card, letter or note once a week to someone undergoing chemotherapy.
•https://vocalid.ai/voicebank/–> Share your voice and help drive innovation in voice technology to those living with speech impairments in need of a custom voice.
•https://www.ted.com/participate/translate -> An online community of volunteers who subtitle TED Talks and enable the inspiring ideas in them to crisscross languages and borders.
•https://decoders.amnesty.org/-> Operated by Amnesty International, this network of digital volunteers helps conduct research into global human rights violations.
•https://www.storiitime.com/ -> Set up a free remote storytime video call with your child and a senior. Volunteer to be a senior reader. (only available in US, Canada & UK).
•https://www.allforgood.org/-> Database with thousands of volunteer opportunities.
•https://www.careervillage.org/-> A global platform where students can ask questions and professionals can answer them.
•https://www.growmovement.org/–> A platform for volunteers to transfer business skills to African entrepreneurs through mentorship via Skype, phone, and email.
•https://helpwithcovid.com/-> A group of tech volunteers have created a tech-specific virtual volunteer opportunities.
As ever don’t feel bad if you can’t give back right now, you be you, and it’s Ok to not be ok.
6 month look back- Summary / TLDR
Here is the short version! Since lock down
We have:
Ran every planned game night
Ran nearly 60 extra free events
Increased the free lending library 33 to 120 titles (£2500 of titles from A to Z)
Delivered / lent our 100th games, around 1/3 of the collection is on loan at most times!
Raised £1000 for charity
Ran summer secret Santa / gift exchange
Commission more merchandise to raise money to keep our events free.
Create two charity Emoji quizzes
Created numerous guides and articles
Appeared on the radio 3 times
Formed a new RPG group.
Ran 12 different RPG systems.
6 month look back.
What an interesting six months it has been, we were just getting ready to go to Airecon, the last big convention to be held almost anywhere. We’d just rushed to remake our life size Tsuro, after auctioning off our first version for £120 for charity.
We had a roller banner and had a graphic designer help us bring out signage up to scratch. Ready for a year of visiting conventions and showing off our giant games as well as running events ourselves.
We had just started the engine to try and get prizes for our May charity day. last year we had £2000 in prizes, entertained 120 people and raised £2245
We could have easily shut our doors when the lockdown happened. We didn’t, we had a charity event in two week. Despite all of us still working full time we ending up learning and experimenting, buying and borrowing kit (Did you try and buy a web cam in March and April!)
We found ways to run our games online, found online games like Jackbox, found browser games. Wrote user guides and articles, shared good new stories and lots of amazing free resources put out by companies. We ran every single event we planned. We ran our May event albeit a lot smaller.
We’ve raised over £1000 since lock down.
That alone is amazing, loads of clubs and societies have just shut their doors, we did more! We added more weekly events, escape rooms and unlock games, Role play sessions, video game nights and custom codename session involving such puns as codegames, codebrains, Codegame of thrones and codedames.
Since lock down We’ve ran around an extra 10 free events a month (up from 2), that’s over 70 free game sessions, up from around 13.
The extra sessions are made up of games nights, charity events, computer and video game session and RPG one shots. They don’t include the atleast 5 active RPG campaigns 3 of which started during lock down, most of them meet weekly online.
We ran an amazing Secret Santa and commissioned a celebratory tankard with profits going to cover club costs (so we can keep our events free)
We ran two emoji (Film and Board games quizzes to raise money for Mind and to provide some fun.
We formed a sister division to manage the new Role play section. We’ve played Dungeons and Dragons 5e, Warhammer Fantasy Role Play 4e, Alien, Masks, Zombie World, Mothership, Hostile, Savage Worlds Explorer edition, Cthulhu, Fiasco, Dungeon Crawl Classic.
We’ve taken players from their very first Role play game to running their own sessions, coaching and supporting them all of the way. Atleast three weekly campaigns have started too.
Despite being the face of HB, I am shy and very introverted, I’ve appeared on the local radio 3 times (first ever radio appearance) explaining the value of gaming and community especially during lock down.
For me personally I’ve run online board games for the first time, ran online RPGs, ran online games for strangers and joined strangers in online games. I’m proud of my self and am loving my new found skills and confidence.
This also came with learning various new systems including Roll20, discord, Foundry, OBS Studio and more.
Thats not all! We took our fledgling free game library from 30 titles in March to 120 in August. Thanks to grants, publisher donations and personal donations we 120 games covering the full alphabet and with something for every from light family games like My First Carcasonne to award winning titles like Wingspan.
We’ve been delivering games into families into isolation and lockdown, providing even more free fun and letter them try before the buy.
we have delivered / lent over 100 games (since November), around 1/3 of the collection is on loan at most times!
I’ve also migrated and revamped the main website to massively lower costs and created a brand new website for games library.
It has been a hard six months for everyone. The team and I have worked hard to provide free entertainment and social outlets. I know our games nights are the highlights of more than one persons weeks, that is a huge honour and responsibility.
Keep on being awesome to each other all.
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Finally if you’ve struggled during the last six month but you are still here struggling on, that is winning too, don’t feel bad or any pressure to do lots of things if you aren’t in a place to be able to
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We are going to stay online for a bit longer, we will meet in person when we can delivery a great games night safely.
We are aiming to continue games nights weekly and atleast 2 RPG nights a month
We will aim to continue online sessions as they are accessible and inclusive in ways in-person events aren’t.