These are some starting notes, because I'm posting them right now to someone on a mailing list. I'll add some more practical advice later. But for starters, the warnings and general advice statements:

Archery is the most inherently expensive, time consuming, dangerous, and frustrating part of the boffer larp hobby.  

There is no way to do archery "on the cheap". If you are trying to cut costs, you are making it dangerous for the other players. Don't do that. If you haven't budgeted at least $100 for getting yourself started in larp archery, you aren't in the right ballpark yet. And I'm not talking about spending $80 of that on a pretty bow.

Expect your first arrow design to be laughed at and pronounced unsafe. I did a crapton of research before making my first ones and still had this happen.  

When you have a design you think is safe, test it. A lot. Against hard targets like brick walls and such. And then against soft targets like melons. Then rip up those arrows and build new ones, because you probably ruined them while testing them on hard targets. Then, finally, test them on a friend who has really good health insurance.

Once you have a design that some folks consider safe, still expect your arrows not to pass safety inspection about half the time when you go from game to game. To help with this, make a cutaway version of your arrows that demonstrates to the safety officer exactly how you have constructed the inside of your arrows. If you don't do so, expect the safety officer to destroy one of your arrows cutting it open themselves. If they don't do this, they aren't really doing their duty very well.  

There is no arrow design using conventional materials that will satisfy every safety officer. Some games don't allow wood shafts. Others don't allow aluminum or composite shafts. See the catch-22? The only design I've seen so far that might, just maybe, pass everywhere is the one Iron Liege uses, which uses golf tube shafts. Not golf clubs. The plastic tubes in a golf bag that hold the clubs. They make for very safe arrows (and bolts too) but they lose a bit in range and still get broken somewhat easily. But they break pretty safely.

Expect about half of your arrows to be destroyed every game. You might get lucky and have a lower percentage than this, but don't assume you will. It's not everyone else's fault when they step on your arrows and break them. It's your fault for launching those things into combat and putting them under everyone's feet. So go into it expecting that you'll have to continually spend time and money remaking arrows. Or buying them, if you're going the pre-purchased route.

For bow poundage, you want something in the 15-20 pound range if you want it to be acceptable widely. Some games allow as much as 35 pounds, but most prefer something lighter. So you want to look at children's practice bows. Keep in mind that those are often rated for a shorter than 28 inch draw length, so you need to go lower if you still want it to be under 20 pounds when drawn to 28 inches, which is the adult standard draw length. Oh, and almost no games allow compound bows.

For crossbow poundage, things get trickier. Most games apply the same rules to poundage for crossbows that they do for arrows. But this isn't correct, because crossbows have a much shorter time to accelerate their projectile than bows do. Plus crossbow bolts are generally lighter, so even when accelerated to the same speed, they have less inertia behind them. So it all gets very confusing and there are no widely accepted standards on the subject. So if you want to shoot something pistol-style that's safe for larp, my advice is to talk your GM into letting you use Nerf guns. You can modify them to look like crossbows pretty easily. And they are super safe.

At Eidolon, we don't have centralized food service as part of the game. Many different players bring food to share with others. These are some suggestions for how to have a successful in-game potluck.

1. Don't bring 10 servings. Bring maybe 5-6. Or maybe just 3-4. If you bring more, it will be harder to prep and half of it won't get eaten. If 1/4 of the players each bring 4-5 servings of food, we'll have food left over.
2. Plan on bringing your own pots and pans. Plan on washing them. Bring soap and a scrubber for doing so.
3. Assume that it's going to take you at least twice as long to prepare your meal at game as it would at home. Also assume that you'll be distracted by friends and game and won't want to spend 2-3 hours each meal on food prep.
4. Try to figure out the maximum amount you can prep the food beforehand without actually finishing the meal. Reheating a finished meal on site is often much more difficult than you would imagine. We have no ovens or microwaves available, only camp stoves (and often not enough of those).
5. Heating water is very difficult without a lid on your pot. Especially if it's a big pot. And camp stove gas is somewhat expensive. Bring a lid.
6. Many meals cosist of some meat mixed in with some vegetables, possibly added to some sort of starch, like pasta or rice or potatoes. It is usually possible to prepare and pre-cook the meat, which will cut your prep time during game in half. It also means you won't be prepping raw meat on site, which is good for health safety.
7. Also, a bag of frozen vegetables can often be used instead of prepping raw veggies on site. Another good way to save in-game prep time.

An example of good pre-game meal prep. Mashed potatoes. Thursday night or Friday morning, depending on your schedule. Clean the potatoes. Peel the potatoes. Cube the potatoes. Put them in a large cassarole dish with a lid and a splash of water. Microwave them for about 2 minutes per potato you used, so they'll be about half cooked already. Put them into a ziploc bag. When you get to site, you just need to dump them in a pot with a little hot water (and a lid. Very important!) and heat them up for 20 min or so.

As a counter example, it took Russell about an hour and a half to prepare a mashed potato dish on site a few games ago. Maybe longer. Altogether he spent at least 2 hours of game time involved with that meal. Plus, it took much longer to cook, which used a lot of camp stove fuel, which is rather expensive.

Another example. Elizabeth brought jambalaya which was fully cooked with the rice already in it. It didn't reheat well at all. An inch of it burned at the bottom of the pot and it took about an hour to heat up. A better way to prep it would have been to bring it as a soupy mixture, heat that, and throw in Minute Rice. Much much easier.