Everyone involved in Keppinautur was completely worn out after the weekend, partially due to a shortage of staff. A few of us hatched a plan to combat this next year— Run a quarterly in-club tournament to train up staff that can help with the big tournament, and just generally make sure that the whole club has tournament experience.

Plans are one thing, but making them happen is quite another. That requires someone to step up and take responsibility. In this case, that someone ended up being me. So, I’ve now volunteered to run a series of four tournaments over the course of the next year.

The idea is to only have a single division each quarter, but to change weapons every tournament; part of the winner’s prize is to choose the weapons that will be used the next time.

This weekend was spent figuring out how to go from this general concept to an actual series of events. Over the past several weeks, I’ve been running a poll to decide on the date of the first tournament; it will be held on June 21 during our normal practice timeslot. My current plan is to run as many rounds of a Swiss tournament as time allows, followed by a single-elimination finals bracket.

In addition to figuring out the tournament structure, I also spent some time coming up with a name/theme for both the series and the individual competitions. Since we’re planning to hold 4 competitions per year, I went looking for some inspiration that comes in fours. I eventually settled on the four Icelandic Landvættir— The ongoing series will be Reykjavík HEMA Club’s Landvættamót. Each of the four annual competitions will be named for and represented by one of the vættir, starting with the dragon Dreki for our summer competitions.

I also spent a lot of time researching possible awards that we could give out, ranging from a floating trophy to custom medals to the various stock options. My conclusion was that anything stock would be too chintzy for my tastes, but anything custom-made would be too expensive. Fortunately, the various artists in the club have latched onto the concept, and are working on logos/artwork that we can use.

I can’t wait to see what they come up with, and the early sketches are already looking great. That gave me the confidence to take on a craft project and try to make award medals myself. I realized that there’s no mechanical difference between an award medal and any other piece of jewelry, and jewelry-making is a fairly common hobby. After a little bit of research, I ordered some gold, silver, and bronze-colored pendant backs, glass cabochons, and transparent jeweler’s glue. Add a printout of the tournament logo in the middle, and we have bespoke award medals to give out without breaking the budget.

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