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So you want to run an HFS feast, eh? I've been doing that for a while, on
and off. There are a bunch of things to consider, but if you're just planning a plain
catered feast with nothing too unusual — which is the best idea, at least for
your first one — then it becomes reasonably simple.
Find out: Would I make a good head
cook? What kind of feast would I like to prepare? What should I serve? Where do
I look for period recipes? How do I tell which recipes work well for a feast?
How much food should I buy? How do I make sure everything is done at once? How
much help do I need? When would I start to plan? Will anyone like it? Where do
I get unusual ingredients? How do I establish a budget? What do I need to do
after the dishes are washed? What are brown blobs, and why are they bad?
Here's my list of instructions.
First
First, decide on a date. Check for clashes. Make sure there's nothing
on locally or in the nearby groups:
Now, choose a venue. You need to take into account location, price,
size of the kitchen and other former stewards' experiences. For example, avoid
the mumble mumble Club Hall because they keep accusing us of damaging
their pool table so they don't have to give the bond back; avoid the mumble
mumble Community Center because their kitchen is the size of a shoebox; and
so on. Ask around the local group for advice on this.
Then, assemble a team. If you're like me, cooking is a dark art best
left to those who can locate the business end of a turnip without a map; so you
need a Head Cook. The Head Cook will need, at minimum, a couple of kitchen
hands. You will also want a couple of people to help with setting up
and more, different people, to help with tearing down at the end of the
night. Finally, you'll want a couple of doorkeepers to take money at the
door.
At Least Two Months Before
At least two months before, you should prepare a budget, which
basically looks like this:
Name of Event
Date of Event
Venue
Expenses:
Venue Deposit (refundable)
Venue Hire (non-refundable)
Food (per head)
Income:
Ticket Price – members
Ticket Price – non-members
Calculate your break-even point, thus:
P = H ÷ (T – F – K)
where:
P = the number of people you need
to break even
H = the venue hire fee (the non-refundable part)
T = the ticket price for a member
F = the cost of food for one person
K = the Kingdom levy, $1 per person
In other words, the number of people you need to break even is your fixed
costs divided by the total profit per person. Your fixed costs are usually just
the venue hire fee; your profit per person is your ticket price less the cost
of food and the Kingdom levy. Calculate that and you'll know the minimum number
of people you need to entice along to avoid making a truly stupid loss.
The Kingdom levy of $1 per person doesn't actually get paid on a
feast-by-feast basis; instead, the barony pays a lump sum to save having to do
lots of extra calculations for every event. But it's sensible to factor it in
anyway, since it has to come from somewhere.
Generally, 30 people is a reasonable number for a feast. If your break-even
number is less than that, your tickets are probably too expensive and you
should lower the price. If the break even is much more than fifty or sixty,
you'll need to do some serious advertising to get that many people through the
door, so you should aim instead to reduce your costs, generally by cutting the
amount you spend on food, or else increase your ticket prices slightly. Discuss
this with the Seneschal if you're not sure how to make the numbers work.
Talk to the Chancellor to make sure you're not doing something
impossible, like budgeting two dollars a head for a six-course dinner and
holding it in the Great Hall of Parliament House at a cost of ten thousand
dollars for the night. Also, sort out the details of your booking policy and
how you'll be tracking the financial side of things.
Book the venue and pay the deposit.
Give details to the Populace Include all the relevant details: the
venue, dates, ticket prices, steward and booking contact details (email and
phone) and a short, plain-English description of the event. Plain English is
important! If you find yourself starting the description with "Good
Gentles All!" or referring to it as a "missive", go have a drink
and a lie down and try again later.
At Least A Month Before
Get a funds for food: work it out at Price Per Head multiplied by a
reasonable guess at likely attendance figures. Assume three times the number
who've booked by this time, or 40, or some number that you and the Reeve agree
on. Give the cheque to your Head Cook (this would be a good time to find out
their mundane name, since most banks won't cash cheques to "Lord Ethelred
the Loquacious"). Most food will be bought a day or so before, but if your
cook has the opportunity to shop around for non-perishable specials well in
advance, it's no bad thing.
Contact local officers and make sure they or their deputies will be
at the event. Generally you need the constable, the chirurgeon and the herald,
or their proxies. If the B&B are planning to run court, or the royalty are
coming along, you need to make sure the herald is well in the loop.
Keep the Head Cook informed of numbers. Bookings are tricky beasts;
sometimes everyone books, sometimes no one does. Ask other stewards for advice,
and be prepared to hold your nose and wing it. Most Lochacian branches
have enough money that they can afford the occasional loss, but that's no
excuse to go in blindly and stuff up badly. You'll only go wrong if you lose
track of the details, so Don't Do That Then.
Advertise online on the local and Lochacian mailing lists. Remember
to mention the date and the (mundane) location!
The Week Before
Close bookings. Let people know they can still book, but their
tickets will be non-refundable, and they may not get fed if there's a sudden
run on places. Give the Head Cook the final (ha!) numbers... and then update
them daily as people call in at the last minute saying "what, was that
this weekend?".
Ensure the Head Cook has enough money and help. Liaise with the reeve
for the former and your friends and household for the latter. The barony cares
more about having a fun time than about everything going precisely as planned,
so be flexible and it will work out.
Remind the Head Cook to keep all receipts. You need to make the
numbers balance. If there are any missing, you need a record of what was spent,
where and why; no need to notarise or sign Stat Decs, but try to be accurate at
least.
On The Day
Get there early and set up with plenty of time. If any of your team
don't show up, hunt them down and kill themcall in friends and household
members to help out. Setup always takes longer than you expect.
Be sure your doorkeepers have everything they need. That means:
Everyone should be given a receipt, and it should include the payer's
name, the date, how many members and non-members the payment is for, and the
total amount.
If anyone writes a cheque, get them to put their phone number on the back.
This is so that, if the financials take a bit longer than expected and the
steward (that's you) doesn't deposit the cheques the very next Monday morning,
then nobody needs to be surprised by sudden bank fees.
Also, you need two doorkeepers, not one. Why? Because otherwise there
will come a time when punters are queuing impatiently at the door while your
one-and-only troll sits in the dunny with the cashbox balanced on her lap...
and that's not a good look.
DON'T LEAVE SITE! If you need something, delegate someone else to get
it. A feast is a symphony, and you're the conductor; if the wind section
doesn't know which direction to look to find you, they'll probably start
twiddling off on their own and playing Wagner, and that's never a good
thing.
Keep note of who's helping; it's useful for your report.
On that topic, children make good servers, past the age of eight or
so, and they're usually the ones hanging around with nothing to do, so make use
of them.
Get some bread out on the table early. Bread is a good cheap way to
take the edge of everyone's hunger, so they don't storm the kitchens when the
first course is five minutes late. It also helps soothe fractious and fussy
kids (except the gluten-intolerent ones) and guarantees that they get something
to eat at least.
In general, actually running the event is the easy part. Make sure the door
is manned and the money is being looked after; listen to people's comments,
especially about the food, and make sure the Head Cook is getting enough
support so that people get fed before they start to flake. Balance the Tin
Hats' "requests" with some sense of reality, and don't just do as
you're told all the time — that way lies chaos.
Finally, when the event is over, hand over to your take-down team, make sure
the place is tidier than when you arrived, and be there to turn out the lights
and lock the doors. Then go home and collapse for twelve hours.
Afterwards
Don't leave the reporting too late. You will forget something! The
next morning is ideal. I have run feasts at which I presented the Reeve with
the final financial reports during the feast, because I had a laptop and
a printer with me, but I'm a known showoff and you don't need to emulate that.
Although the look on Adair's face made it all worthwhile...
Deposit all cheques immediately! Any cheque that has been sitting in
your cashbox for more than a week should be considered suspect, because our
populace are not all millionaires and unpresented cheques have a habit of
bouncing if they're forgotten about. Your doorkeepers, if they followed the
advice above, will have written phone numbers on the back of each cheque; use
them if necessary to confirm that the money's still in the account if you're
late depositing them. Or better still, don't be late depositing them.
Get the deposit back from the venue and make sure everything was
tidied up to their satisfaction.
Present all receipts, receipt books, takings and sundry other financial
details to the reeve, along with a financial report explaining
everything you spent (expenses), all money you took in (income) and the precise
difference between the two totals (profit or loss). Remember to count the venue
deposit twice — once as an expense when you paid it, and once as income when
you get it back.
Oh, and don't forget to thank everyone who helped.
And that's about it. Follow these instructions and I'm reasonably sure you
won't hurt yourself or get executed for treason. In fact, if you do get
executed for treason as a result of following these instructions, I will
personally send apologies to your next of kin upon receipt of a death certificate.
You can't get a better offer than that!
and off. There are a bunch of things to consider, but if you're just planning a plain
catered feast with nothing too unusual — which is the best idea, at least for
your first one — then it becomes reasonably simple.
Find out: Would I make a good head
cook? What kind of feast would I like to prepare? What should I serve? Where do
I look for period recipes? How do I tell which recipes work well for a feast?
How much food should I buy? How do I make sure everything is done at once? How
much help do I need? When would I start to plan? Will anyone like it? Where do
I get unusual ingredients? How do I establish a budget? What do I need to do
after the dishes are washed? What are brown blobs, and why are they bad?
Here's my list of instructions.
First
First, decide on a date. Check for clashes. Make sure there's nothing
on locally or in the nearby groups:
Now, choose a venue. You need to take into account location, price,
size of the kitchen and other former stewards' experiences. For example, avoid
the mumble mumble Club Hall because they keep accusing us of damaging
their pool table so they don't have to give the bond back; avoid the mumble
mumble Community Center because their kitchen is the size of a shoebox; and
so on. Ask around the local group for advice on this.
Then, assemble a team. If you're like me, cooking is a dark art best
left to those who can locate the business end of a turnip without a map; so you
need a Head Cook. The Head Cook will need, at minimum, a couple of kitchen
hands. You will also want a couple of people to help with setting up
and more, different people, to help with tearing down at the end of the
night. Finally, you'll want a couple of doorkeepers to take money at the
door.
At Least Two Months Before
At least two months before, you should prepare a budget, which
basically looks like this:
Name of Event
Date of Event
Venue
Expenses:
Venue Deposit (refundable)
Venue Hire (non-refundable)
Food (per head)
Income:
Ticket Price – members
Ticket Price – non-members
Calculate your break-even point, thus:
P = H ÷ (T – F – K)
where:
P = the number of people you need
to break even
H = the venue hire fee (the non-refundable part)
T = the ticket price for a member
F = the cost of food for one person
K = the Kingdom levy, $1 per person
In other words, the number of people you need to break even is your fixed
costs divided by the total profit per person. Your fixed costs are usually just
the venue hire fee; your profit per person is your ticket price less the cost
of food and the Kingdom levy. Calculate that and you'll know the minimum number
of people you need to entice along to avoid making a truly stupid loss.
The Kingdom levy of $1 per person doesn't actually get paid on a
feast-by-feast basis; instead, the barony pays a lump sum to save having to do
lots of extra calculations for every event. But it's sensible to factor it in
anyway, since it has to come from somewhere.
Generally, 30 people is a reasonable number for a feast. If your break-even
number is less than that, your tickets are probably too expensive and you
should lower the price. If the break even is much more than fifty or sixty,
you'll need to do some serious advertising to get that many people through the
door, so you should aim instead to reduce your costs, generally by cutting the
amount you spend on food, or else increase your ticket prices slightly. Discuss
this with the Seneschal if you're not sure how to make the numbers work.
Talk to the Chancellor to make sure you're not doing something
impossible, like budgeting two dollars a head for a six-course dinner and
holding it in the Great Hall of Parliament House at a cost of ten thousand
dollars for the night. Also, sort out the details of your booking policy and
how you'll be tracking the financial side of things.
Book the venue and pay the deposit.
Give details to the Populace Include all the relevant details: the
venue, dates, ticket prices, steward and booking contact details (email and
phone) and a short, plain-English description of the event. Plain English is
important! If you find yourself starting the description with "Good
Gentles All!" or referring to it as a "missive", go have a drink
and a lie down and try again later.
At Least A Month Before
Get a funds for food: work it out at Price Per Head multiplied by a
reasonable guess at likely attendance figures. Assume three times the number
who've booked by this time, or 40, or some number that you and the Reeve agree
on. Give the cheque to your Head Cook (this would be a good time to find out
their mundane name, since most banks won't cash cheques to "Lord Ethelred
the Loquacious"). Most food will be bought a day or so before, but if your
cook has the opportunity to shop around for non-perishable specials well in
advance, it's no bad thing.
Contact local officers and make sure they or their deputies will be
at the event. Generally you need the constable, the chirurgeon and the herald,
or their proxies. If the B&B are planning to run court, or the royalty are
coming along, you need to make sure the herald is well in the loop.
Keep the Head Cook informed of numbers. Bookings are tricky beasts;
sometimes everyone books, sometimes no one does. Ask other stewards for advice,
and be prepared to hold your nose and wing it. Most Lochacian branches
have enough money that they can afford the occasional loss, but that's no
excuse to go in blindly and stuff up badly. You'll only go wrong if you lose
track of the details, so Don't Do That Then.
Advertise online on the local and Lochacian mailing lists. Remember
to mention the date and the (mundane) location!
The Week Before
Close bookings. Let people know they can still book, but their
tickets will be non-refundable, and they may not get fed if there's a sudden
run on places. Give the Head Cook the final (ha!) numbers... and then update
them daily as people call in at the last minute saying "what, was that
this weekend?".
Ensure the Head Cook has enough money and help. Liaise with the reeve
for the former and your friends and household for the latter. The barony cares
more about having a fun time than about everything going precisely as planned,
so be flexible and it will work out.
Remind the Head Cook to keep all receipts. You need to make the
numbers balance. If there are any missing, you need a record of what was spent,
where and why; no need to notarise or sign Stat Decs, but try to be accurate at
least.
On The Day
Get there early and set up with plenty of time. If any of your team
don't show up, hunt them down and kill themcall in friends and household
members to help out. Setup always takes longer than you expect.
Be sure your doorkeepers have everything they need. That means:
- A lockable cashbox, with a
key. - All the receipt books.
- The complete list of prices
and all the various exceptions for College members, families, children and
so on. - Several biros to write with: not
felt pens because felt pens run badly when drinks get spilled, and
they don't carry through the carbon paper in receipt books. - A list of everyone who's
booked, arranged by mundane surname because that's the part that's least
likely to get messed up or forgotten. - Any waivers and sign-in forms
provided by the constable, if they agree to look after that aspect as well
— remember, officially it's the constable's job to get waivers signed, and
the stewarding team's job to take money, so the two jobs should be done by
a single person only with the agreement of all parties: don't assume!
Everyone should be given a receipt, and it should include the payer's
name, the date, how many members and non-members the payment is for, and the
total amount.
If anyone writes a cheque, get them to put their phone number on the back.
This is so that, if the financials take a bit longer than expected and the
steward (that's you) doesn't deposit the cheques the very next Monday morning,
then nobody needs to be surprised by sudden bank fees.
Also, you need two doorkeepers, not one. Why? Because otherwise there
will come a time when punters are queuing impatiently at the door while your
one-and-only troll sits in the dunny with the cashbox balanced on her lap...
and that's not a good look.
DON'T LEAVE SITE! If you need something, delegate someone else to get
it. A feast is a symphony, and you're the conductor; if the wind section
doesn't know which direction to look to find you, they'll probably start
twiddling off on their own and playing Wagner, and that's never a good
thing.
Keep note of who's helping; it's useful for your report.
On that topic, children make good servers, past the age of eight or
so, and they're usually the ones hanging around with nothing to do, so make use
of them.
Get some bread out on the table early. Bread is a good cheap way to
take the edge of everyone's hunger, so they don't storm the kitchens when the
first course is five minutes late. It also helps soothe fractious and fussy
kids (except the gluten-intolerent ones) and guarantees that they get something
to eat at least.
In general, actually running the event is the easy part. Make sure the door
is manned and the money is being looked after; listen to people's comments,
especially about the food, and make sure the Head Cook is getting enough
support so that people get fed before they start to flake. Balance the Tin
Hats' "requests" with some sense of reality, and don't just do as
you're told all the time — that way lies chaos.
Finally, when the event is over, hand over to your take-down team, make sure
the place is tidier than when you arrived, and be there to turn out the lights
and lock the doors. Then go home and collapse for twelve hours.
Afterwards
Don't leave the reporting too late. You will forget something! The
next morning is ideal. I have run feasts at which I presented the Reeve with
the final financial reports during the feast, because I had a laptop and
a printer with me, but I'm a known showoff and you don't need to emulate that.
Although the look on Adair's face made it all worthwhile...
Deposit all cheques immediately! Any cheque that has been sitting in
your cashbox for more than a week should be considered suspect, because our
populace are not all millionaires and unpresented cheques have a habit of
bouncing if they're forgotten about. Your doorkeepers, if they followed the
advice above, will have written phone numbers on the back of each cheque; use
them if necessary to confirm that the money's still in the account if you're
late depositing them. Or better still, don't be late depositing them.
Get the deposit back from the venue and make sure everything was
tidied up to their satisfaction.
Present all receipts, receipt books, takings and sundry other financial
details to the reeve, along with a financial report explaining
everything you spent (expenses), all money you took in (income) and the precise
difference between the two totals (profit or loss). Remember to count the venue
deposit twice — once as an expense when you paid it, and once as income when
you get it back.
Oh, and don't forget to thank everyone who helped.
And that's about it. Follow these instructions and I'm reasonably sure you
won't hurt yourself or get executed for treason. In fact, if you do get
executed for treason as a result of following these instructions, I will
personally send apologies to your next of kin upon receipt of a death certificate.
You can't get a better offer than that!