Mayfest and Augfest are Family Friendly

With camping only fees for eleven year olds and under, a relaxed, supportive and friendly crowd of players and a wide range of activities availabler over the festival weekend, Mayfest and Augfest are well suited to families, as many have found out. We work the festivals on the principle of "It is the players festival. Everyone at the festival is a player. Everyone helps run the festival." This means we have no paid crew and this in turn means the whole event costs less. We chose this principle so that those who cannot afford other festivals can just about afford ours. Families find it hard because of transport and numbers, unemployed find it hard because of cash flow and students find it hard due to both cash flow and time out of study. Because our prices are so low, it makes saving for the event achievable for students, unemployed and families. If a family is having any kind of difficulty, it is often overcome shortly after talking to us about it.

Children: Just as societies throughout history and in fantasy have children so do our festivals welcome them. Many of our players first started live role play as kids at Mayfest and are still coming. As we are a rletively small organisation in numbers we can provide the right type of extra activities for kids to suit them. We virtually always provide a kids adventure. We supply areas which families can camp in that will remain 'out of character' the whole time. In general these are enough distance from main activity areas that noise will not disturb young children. No 'monsters' enter these areas and, incidently, they are the nearest camping areas to the toilets! Finally, we said above that everyone helps out run the festival. This includes children who can help out in a number of ways (most ages especially like sorting out the 'old props' box, for example). We all enforce a rule that if children leave the camping areas for any reason their parents (or person looking after them) must be told before they leave. In general when they go into the woodlands or lower meadows we try to ensure that at least one parent is on hand. In spite of all this the kids have a great time, love being in safe play with adults and make a great contribution to the festivals.

Teens: Families with teenagers generally love our festivals as the age barriers get stripped away by roleplay. Here are safe ways the kids can compete, not only with each other but with adults. As a rather unusual example, one year a 13 to 14 year old girl actually won our knock out champion of the festival competition.

Students: Don't kid yourself, there will be no revision, etc. at the festivals. No matter what intentions you have, it just does not happen! However the relaxing break - generally around the times of exams - has refreshed many students and, they feel, resulted in them getting better results than they expected.