First news of Season Five!

Hey Westfinders!

Hope you all had/continue to have fantastic summers. Quite a bit of change has come to Westfinder over the summer, what with half of Staff moving off to college and the SITs of last year coming in to take their places. And so, with August starting to wind down and Westfinder's 5th season about to start, it's time for.... EPIC NEWS EMAIL TIME.

Staff News:
Staff now consists of Tom Kelly, Co-Head of Production and CTF staff; Sam Sher, Co-Head of Production; Jaron Smith, CTF and general staff; Benjy Wachter, Workshop Head and CTF staff; Eve Irwin, Costuming Head; and Jeremy Gleick and Simka Senyak, Co-Directors.

As all the old SITs have become new Staff, we're going to need some new SITs. We'll be sending out a call for applications very soon!

Capture the Flag and Adventure the Flag news:
As always, Capture the Flag will be every Sunday from 12 to 4 at Codornices Park in Berkeley. There's a suggested donation of $1 (CTF staff is awesome! They work super hard! Yay!) but that is, of course, only suggested. CTF has been going on all summer, but with pretty low attendance. Start coming again, guys! It's awesome and fun.
As of now, the Adventure the Flag submission pool is OPEN! This is a constant call for adventures, with absolutely no limit on how many you submit. Please send Westfinder a paragraph summary of your one-hour-or-so-long adventure. ATFs have no advance preparation or assigning of characters; everything will be done day-of. Also, no propstuming. The title is all the teaser you need. We'll pick one a month to start, but as the number of submissions (we hope) goes up, we'll increase the frequency of running them.

Bootleg and Tavernite news:
If you haven't heard already, we have a truly awesome lineup this year (like it's ever not awesome...). The schedule is as follows:
September 11th: Chord: Quest for the Tree of Song, by Ben Gould
October 16th: Artichoke Salad, by Rowan Abraham
November 13th: Hive: Shadowplay, by Jeremy Gleick
January 1st: Too Soon Forgotten, by Ben Schwartz & Jesse Riemer
January 15th: Spectrum Nations Delegations, by Jenna Brotsky & Molly Fullerton
February 12th: Karolina’s Bloodline, by Tait Melody "Purple" Pan/Adams & Colette Smith
March 12th: The Bestiary of Baton Rouge, by Devon Brinner
April 16th: Uber, by Stefan Hulaj
May 21st: Covenant, by Sam Magness

The teaser and survey for Chord are going out shortly!

Bootlegs are usually run in Tilden from 9 to 6 and cost $20. Specifics and other information will go out with each game.

We're doing something different with Tavernites this year. Instead of making a yearly call like we do with the bootlegs, we will have four Tavernite seasons throughout the year (and the summer!) with quarterly calls for submissions. Submissions should go in in August, November, February, and May, and of course we'll send you a reminder email. One or two will be run each season.
A Tavernite submission should be a teaser and a little summary, with one or two flow points and some characters. Remember that they should be low production. Please start sending us your Tavernite submissions for the September - December season! We'll send out a separate reminder email about this.

Finally, as you may have noticed, we're losing quite a bunch of people to the gaping maw of college (college is great, we support college. We just miss you guys!), so it's time to take action. How? With the Solano Stroll! If you don't know already, the Solano Stroll is a ridiculously fun yearly event on Solano Avenue, which goes through Berkeley and Albany. This year, Staff and anyone else who wants to join in will meet up, divide into groups, and go up and down Solano having epic sword battles and handing out fliers. It'll be super fun, plus people will see and want to join in and thusly we'll have new members! Once again, a separate email with more information will go out closer to the Stroll.
Also, anyone interested in helping design fliers and/or posting fliers around and possibly in schools in the area, please contact us! We want you, we need you.

So here ends our news. We want to keep ya'll up to date, though, so we're going to start sending out monthly newsletters and regularly updating this blog again!