Hunger Games RPG

Well I promised a post about our RPG, so here it is. If any of you aren't already into gaming here's a good tip: find a geeky friend to help you. I LARP and play RPGS, but I was a bit over my head when it came to initial planning of the whole thing. Thankfully, I had my trusted friend Josh to help me out.

While I was waiting for him to come help me with getting character sheets and explaining how to be an ST (storyteller or GM, if you prefer Game Master - since that's what they were called in the books), I took it upon myself to map out my arena and get an idea of what weapons I wanted available to my players. If I had graph paper, I would've used it - instead, I measured and drew the grid. In my head, each square was 1/4 mile, but I don't think that was realistic enough. It probably would've only been 100 ft or so. *shrugs* The great thing about being GM is that if you find things that aren't working, you can spontaneously change them.

The first map is the one that only I could see.
 I mapped out the terrain and any predators, traps, and poisonous animals/plants that I wanted them to run into. This is also the map I used to keep track of where they all were.
In a normal RPG game, all the players are working together - so it doesn't matter if they know where each other are on the map. In this game, since the players were all against each other, I had to come up with a way to keep them from knowing that, hence the second map. See - if this game was "real life", the characters would have NO IDEA where the other people were. For them to look on a map and see would have given them an unfair way to find each other. The second map was totally blank. I don't even know why I gave it to them, except that so they could keep track of where they were in their heads. Pretty much, I showed them where they were to start out, and then when they wanted to move they would tell me "x # of spaces in X direction" (i.e. 3 squares north or 2 squares southwest). I drew a little dot in each space they moved, so I had a little line to help me keep track of things.

I found a list of weapons on a DnD website, and used a lot of those. Things like a spear, a trident, throwing knives, and a bow and a quiver of arrows are all good weapons. Things like firearms are not, as they were not used in the books. Things like +1 damage mean the player gets to roll an additional dice to see if they hit someone.

It's interesting. I ran this game with two very different groups of kids. My teens at the Main library had all read the books, so they were very cautious and strategic about EVERYTHING. My teens at FW hadn't read any of the books, so they dove head-on and even attacked each other during the first game! Awesome! As much as the game is cool because it brings the story to life for the kids, I actually preferred playing with the kids who hadn't read the books yet. Hopefully, playing this game will spur them to do so. I'm thinking about doing an event close to the time of the movie opening in March. I want to get some archery stations set up and show the kids how to do things like camouflage paint and rope-tying - you know, survival skills.

Halloween Crafts

Originally, I had planned on doing this cool glowing necklace for a craft with my teens, but when it came down to the wire, I had forgotten to order the mini 1.5" glowsticks that I needed, and thus ended up having to come up with something to do at the last minute. Here is where I have to confess: I love Martha Stewart. Well, not necessarily her, but all the people that work for her and come up with all the cute ideas in her website/magazine/tv show. Going to her website and browsing around a little totally saved my butt - especially when I found the

fanged pumpkins.

Walmart had these bags of mini pumpkins  - 3 for $3, so I snapped a few of those up.  The pumpkins were a pretty decent size - about 7 inches or so in diameter and about 4 inches tall.  All you have to do is use the template from Martha Stewart to cut out a mouth and then use that opening to thoroughly scrape out the pumpkin.  (The better you can get it scraped out, the longer it will last.  I think I had mine sitting on my computer til at least Thanksgiving.)  Pop in a set of plastic vampire teeth, use some pins for eyes and voila!  A really cute pumpkin that's super-easy.  The ones I did lasted on my desk for quite awhile too.  If I can find it, I'll post the after picture.  It's pretty funny.

The other craft I did was inspired by Martha Stewart, but not taken directly from there. The website had instructions on making a ghost necklace by allowing a blob of glue to dry and then punching a hole in it. At a horror con awhile back, I had seen someone selling latex jewelry and I thought - why not merge the two? So using food coloring, I mixed up a bottle of dark purple and red dye apiece. Using wax paper, I drew out my design for a bracelet. (An easy way to fasten it is to

 draw a loop on one end and an arrow on the other. Pull the arrow through the hole, and the wings of the arrows catch, holding it closed)

From what I remember the teens liked this, but maybe had a little trouble with the bracelets.  Understandable.  Maybe try it with Tacky glue?  The food coloring will thin it some, and you can thin it with a little water if you need to, but maybe if it doesn't run as much, they'll have an easier time.

The Hunger Games

If you work for a library, and you don't know what The Hunger Games is, then you are stuck in some sort of time wormhole where it's permanently 2004 (or something). It's a fantastic series written by Suzanne Collins and you really need to check it out. I had heard about it and intended to read it, but didn't get off my butt and do it until a bunch of my adult friends got swept up in the stories.

Now, as a little back story, let me tell you that I am a HUGE geek/nerd. I'm part of a stage-combat group that does the living chessboard at the Hoggetowne Medieval Faire every year. I LOVE Doctor Who and Being Human (esp. the British version). The nerdiest thing of all is that I LARP - that's live action role-playing. If you're really old-school, it's a modified version of Dungeons and Dragons, but without the dice. That's what I do every Friday night (I know, you're jealous).

Now that you know all that, I can tell you that when I read The Hunger Games, I got inspired. What book would make a better RPG than that? For those of you totally unfamiliar with the premise of the book, America has fallen and a new country, Panem, has taken its place. The country is divided into 12 Districts and the Capitol. The distribution of goods is a bit uneven, so some districts are starving, while people in the Capitol drink liquids that make them vomit just so they can eat more at the fancy parties they go to. A long time ago, the districts tried to revolt against the Capitol and lost. As a punishment, every year they have something called The Hunger Games. 2 tributes are sent from each district to fight in an arena battle to the death. The last person standing wins. If they win, their district gets food for a year (the other reason it is called The Hunger Games is that kids can put their names in more times to be drawn in order to get food for their family).

It's pretty messed up and violent (making it one of the top 10 most challenged books of 2009-2010), but at the same time, I figured it would be something the kids would really get into. It will definitely make for a battle-heavy RPG, but I'm still confident the kids will enjoy it. We're using basic character sheets from World of Darkness, and I'm trying to make the dice-rolling as simple as possible. I will put up another post detailing more of my pre-planning as soon as I have it all figured out.

We're not starting this til November, but I have put up signs and posted a sign-up sheet to try to generate some early interest. I'm doing a scavenger hunt for Banned Books Week and decided today to give away a copy of the book to the winner. Not that anyone really reads this, but in case you do - check out your local Walmart this week! When I went to pick up copies of The Hunger Games (which were only $6.25/each), I noticed they had a lot of the banned books for sale i.e. 1984, Catcher in the Rye, Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, etc.

Collaged Notebooks

As it was back-to-school time when my programs started off, I decided to kick off my teen programs with a collaged notebook. It was after the major sales, but Office Max still had some crazy sales going on, and I was able to nab several packs of notebooks (3/pack - only $2)!

This is a really easy craft to do, of course, and it requires very little work on your part! All I do is give them the notebooks, paintbrushes, glue, magazines, and scissors and let them go to town. Note: this may need to be a two-parter b/ it takes a long time to pick and cut out the pictures you want. The kids may have to leave the notebooks behind so they can dry.

For those of you not familiar with collaging, the process is simple. Once you have your pictures cut out, take a small amount of water and add it to some regular, white glue. Paint the glue solution onto the area you want you pic, lay

the picture down, and then do another coat of glue on top of it (this helps seal it in). You can buy official Mod-podge at craft stores, but the glue and water works just as well. The only difficulty I had this go-round was that the glue/water solution wanted to bead up - which is an issue I've never had before. I just kept running my brush over it to spread it out, and eventually it dried alright. If you look at my notebook really closely, you can see where the glue is. I also had a problem with my paper wanting to wrinkle up, but again, I just kept smoothing it out with my brush, and didn't seem to turn out too badly.

The kids really liked it, but they ran out of time. Most of them got their notebooks done, they just had to leave them here to dry.

Banned Books Week

Sometimes these special themed weeks really throw me for a loop, and sometimes they can be really inspiring. This year is the first year I'm really celebrating Banned Books Week with my teens, and I've decided to do a scavenger hunt.

I've done scavenger hunts in the past with my teens. The first one I did, found here, was basically trying to get them familiar with the library (there's a question for each section of books) and how to look for things in some of the books. Mine is just to give you an idea of some things you can do because of course you won't have the same displays or books that my library has. It was a bit difficult, and most of the teens didn't finish. I gave them about 45 minutes to do 25 questions (some of which, I'll admit, were hard), so I decided that for this go-round I need to scale it back a bit. *One cool thing we did though - I had a sheet with the answers printed on it and gave it out to the teens, so they could write a story with the answers. The best story won an iPod Shuffle.*

If you go to the American Library Association's website, you can find lists of banned books listed by author, by decade - and that's what I used to write my scavenger hunt. You can find mine here. Again, you may not have the same books - or even the same editions that I have, so you may have to change some of the questions to suit your library. This is just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. I haven't done this with my teens yet, but I'm hoping they will have an easier time with this one.

**Update** Did the scavenger hunt yesterday. I had a hard time getting them to scatter and work separately, and they did have a hard time with this one too. They kept complaining that they didn't know where things were, and I told them that this was supposed to teach them how to do that. Before we started, I asked if they knew how to use our catalog computers and they all said yes, so I ley them go - turns out they didn't know as much as they thought (go figure, right?). Afterwards, when I was giving out prizes and telling them about The Hunger Games and the upcoming RPG, they got really excited (yay!). I think I should've told them about that ahead of time to give them that competitive spirit...**

Geek Love

I was very fortunate that at my library, I used to have a tech person that kept everything - and I mean EVERYTHING. She retired almost a year ago now, but we still have all this old equipment taking up space. I'm talking Macs from the 80s. Yeah - that's something we're going to be using again real soon. Anyways - there were a lot of old keyboards, and since a lot of them didn't have the county inventory tags on them, we claimed for youth services.

If you haven't ever had the chance to do any deconstruction, do it. Now. It's very cathartic to rip something apart and keyboards are no exception. Frustrated with the tons of spam you get or the file you just lost? Rip apart a keyboard and you'll feel better.

So, how did I come to make this particular craft? Not to pat myself on the back, but this is an original creation. After seeing (and using) the heart emoticon, I decided I needed to make a valentine that said I {heart} you. (I can't type the actual emoticon here, because I did, and it messed up the html- this is a rewrite of this part of the post.) The green is part of the circuit board, the plastic "paper" is from the inside, and the letters are keys, of course, all ripped from the keyboards. The circuit board came that size, but if you have others that are larger, you should be able to cut them to size with scissors.

The tweens really liked this one, though apparently I don't have the most tech-savvy ones coming because it took them awhile to figure out what the letters said. If you can get your hands on old keyboards or computers, this is a fun one to try. Next time, I'm going to try to make something bigger using bits we ripped from some old CPUs.

Cassette tape wallets

Well after the Tween Programming workshop I attended yesterday, I am riding high on a wave of good feelings and am ready to get back to writing on here! A quick explanation: I went to a workshop yesterday, and before it began I was thumbing through the powerpoint presentation that had been printed out for us. I was quite surprised to find a number of pictures from this very blog on the slideshow! I said something to the presenter, the awesome Kio Fuller, and she told me she loved this blog! Sweet!

So one of my more recent projects that I thought was totally rad are these cassette tape wallets. Now you might be thinking to yourself, "Cassette tapes? Who has those?". Well - have you looked around your library? I had at least a drawer full of these things in my office from back when they would use them during storytime. I only use CDs or mp3s now, so having them around was only a waste of space until (ta-da!) I stumbled across this craft.

Step 1: Get a small screwdriver (like for glasses) and remove the screws

from the cassette. Some cassette tapes are glued together - esp. the professional ones. If you have any that were original bought as blanks, then those are the ones that have screws (and they're also the easiest to use in this case).

Step 2: Once you have the cassette taken apart, remove the magnetic tape from the inside.

Step 3: Take a zipper, preferably 12 inch, and (starting in the middle, where the magnetic tape would be exposed) glue it to the separate cassette sides. If you can't get a 12 inch zipper, a 9 inch one will do, but you'll have to glue some ribbon to the bottom of the wallet (the "bottom" being where you started and ended the zipper). Hot glue works best.

That's a really basic summary of how to do it. I'm not even sure if I had instructions, but really, if you look at the pictures, I think you can see what you're supposed to do.

As far as the reactions from my tweens? Well, I only had one attend the program. That's my biggest problem. I have plenty of cool ideas, but I don't have that many tweens actually show up. Anyways - the one who came really liked it, and when I put it up on my facebook wall, my friends went nuts over it, so I'm sure if you decided to try it at your library, it would be a big hit.