First News from the Background Committee Mitraspera e. V.’s background committee was developed based on the Mythodea Team’s many years of experience. We aim to learn from the positive as well as negative experiences from that time, and we see Mitraspera e. V. as an opportunity to improve on many things. However, the background committee in Mitraspera e. V. will perform tasks and duties that are quite different from the ones of the former Mythodea Team committee (“Gremium” in German). We are currently working on a code of practice on how we understand our future tasks and in which we will present those in a transparent manner. We hope to be able to publish this Code later this September. Much valid feedback and criticism has reached us over the last few weeks concerning this topic, especially saying that the name suggested that things would be the “same as always”. We can empathise very well with that sentiment. So we unanimously decided to support our members’ initiative to come up with suggestions for a new name in order to propose a name change of the background committee at the next general meeting.

Mitraspera, a Labour of Love by Lena Weber I like to describe Mitraspera as a huge space full of colourful carpets. Every one of them is a story, a piece of art, a character – every little thing that this world consists of. Those carpets touch or even overlap sometimes. There are pathways, even whole town squares of carpets, but also little islands by themselves, somewhere in the room. There is also lots of blank space, where there are no carpets covering the bare flooring, and these spots are just waiting to be covered. Some of these carpets I, personally, like more than others. But all of them are precious. Some seem to have lost their worth because they’ve been used to get to new stretches of floor and have been worn and torn down in the process. Now, nobody seems to care for those “old rags”, but those that wove, created them are still connected to them: Every hand that touched them, every creator has woven a piece of their heart into their creation, be it just a fragment or a whole carpet, large or small. Some creators, our authors, have filled entire rooms with their creations. I created my first little piece of carpet in 2006, and the last one – so far – in 2018. In these years I gave a lot of myself, my love, time, tears, and laughter to Mitraspera. And even though I wasn’t able to continue to give my love the attention and effort it deserved, my passion for the project never diminished – it is a part of me. I love Mitraspera for giving so many creators the opportunity to fill a space with their creations. Together, as a team. And for giving every creator the freedom to walk on those carpets, rest on them, be inspired by and continue to work on them if they are treated with respect and certain rules are kept. I became restless when I realised that “my” Mitraspera was changing at an unprecendent rate and I seemed to be helpless in the face of that change. Not that it hadn’t changed before, Mitraspera has always been changing, but not like this. Suddenly, carpets were being removed, pathways blocked, creators were kept from their work. The rules of conduct were abruptly changed, more change was announced. Talking to people for long stretches of time seemed to yield little to no actual result. I didn’t like that. I was concerned, even afraid for my beloved Mitraspera and started defending it. Not by talking eloquently, as others have tried, but rather by wildly swinging my sword and shouting, without even knowing what I was doing and what it was supposed to achieve. I was busy weaving, creating other parts of my life and I couldn’t be everywhere at once. I had no idea what to do except to gather up my beloved carpets, my creations in blind panic and forbid everyone to ever use them again. I coudn’t even have carried them all away, but maybe the biggest ones, the most essential, the ones I was most proud of. It would have robbed them of their original purpose, they would look weird and out of place in any other room. Without their companion pieces, the other carpets, they would essentially be worthless. But they could find a new space. I talked to a few old fellow creators about what I was planning to do and what they felt like. We quickly discovered that we pretty much all felt the same and had found ourselves in very similar situations – without a solution. Then, a few days ago, one of my old companions called, asking for a moment of my time. He told me that a lot of weavers, creators, were feeling what I was feeling right then. That they wanted to save Mitraspera as a shared project, a shared space. And that our carpets would be worthless if we each carried them away for ourselves. But that we could unite and work together. As a group, like before, we could make our creations accessible to all, show them for the piece of art that they are, make felt the love that had gone into them. And that we could allow everyone to enter our “museum” totally free of charge and that then maybe new carpets would be woven and could be connected to the old ones. And so I decided to support this association and its goals to enable the piece of jointly created art that is Mitraspera to live on, grow, and prosper, and that everyone may enter our world and have a part in it, immortalising their work within its threads. And if its not a big, working museum, we could make it a smaller, travelling show.

What Coming Home Feels Like by Daniel Simons Since I took my leave from the team of authors and game facilitators in 2018, my life has changed a lot. Now I am a father of two kids and LARPing only plays a tiny role in my life. But there is one thing I was missing sorely right away and this is where Mitraspera left a gaping hole in my heart: What I was missing wasn’t necessarily the creative work, the colourful stories and “our” opus. It was the fact that Mitraspera had always been such an awe-inspiring community project. It was the people who joined together every year to do something amazing. Of course, some of them had become my friends and I was still in touch with them, but to many others, contact was reduced to a bare minimum. A few years back, during my active time in the team still, the idea of an association to curate all the creative work was already floating around. Back then, nothing came of it for whatever reasons. When Christian approached me a few weeks ago and told me of his plans for Mitraspera e. V., I felt like I had just completely lost touch with the topic and asked for some time to think. But then it just came back, that fever that is Mitraspera. A few phone calls to old friends, a short video call and there I was, burning again. This feeling of working on such a project with people that you love is just amazing. The fact that we, with all our shared experience and knowledge, would set out to help Mitraspera make its next step as a true community-project of the many didn’t give me a choice. Now I am back, in Mitraspera, among my best friends. And I am so happy to meet so many other old friends again and to welcome as many fresh faces as possible into our world and to hear all the exciting new stories.

Founding an Association – A Look at the Mechanics by Franziska Huber As I am writing these words, publication of the homepage of “Mitraspera e. V.” is 24 hours away. A hundred things are happening at the same time. Phone calls are being made, texts are being created, commented on, and proofread. It looks like we will actually be able to pull off a lot of the things we had set out to do, but it seems to be an impossible task at the same time. From the initial idea of the association to the point of launching the website and making it real, only a few weeks have passed. Those weeks were spent convincing people of the idea, conceptualising, finding a “modus operandi”, and clarifying what the association was supposed to be and do, exactly. The sheer drive, eagerness to argue, and love for the shared project that made all those involved work around the clock is staggering. And when I am writing “around the clock”, it is no understatement: There were times when Kathrin, who currently lives and works in the U.S., finished writing a text in the small (German) hours and was joined a few minutes later by those of us here, woken early by their little kids, who would proofread what she had worked on. We are all continuously blown away by the great chemistry of the group, the feeling of working together on the bigger picture as a “family of Mitraspera”, with passion, positive energy, and lots of love – just like we used to. Over the course of two weeks, we produced 49 documents, communicated in 12 different Discord channels, spoke on the phone to over 30 people, covered a distance of over 2000 km, held eight audio and three video conferences. And now we are live.Mitraspera e. V.