Hi everyone! This is Aly, Norse Wife as I was being called (@skateelf) - here. I wanted to write a lil blog since this is our first day of not having to return to the site to work on clean up!
We wanted to say a special thank you to everyone who was apart of the 5th gathering of nerds. This event truly wouldn't be what it is without all of you. The gathering started off with a literal bang - of thunder!! For anyone who was there on Thursday night we experienced a truly rough micro burst thunder storm, which took out many vendor tents, as well as ours at the NorseForged booth! The incredible team we have came together with the help of other vendors to help get through what would have been an end to most other events. BUT NAY! Not us! We weathered the storm and forged ourselves even closer as a community. Yes, this lead to a lot of other issues like all of the hand painted signs I had made being ruined, decor plans canceled, vendors losing merch and having ruined wares, muddy grounds and fit pits.. But we did it. We still managed to make this the best gathering yet. As I have said before, I love this community because it's rooted in love. Just a bunch of nerds who want to be ourselves amongst the madness of the world.
Friday was crazy town trying to get everyone up and running, plus prepping for the King's Feast - Which was amazing. But, we are going to change that up next year. Norse was gifted an incredible drum from our own Foxy Mama, Tanya. We saw CarlaX do bendy stuff and fire spinning outside. We all got a taste of mead and to fill our bellies. I was very honored to be a part of it. After the feast many of us found ourselves over at Norse Camp enjoying the fire and people playing with fire (safely!). Like Mossy Socks trying fire spinning for the first time and being amazingly good at it!! I'm sure we all have our own special stories from the night life at the gathering and I love that.
Saturday was so busy! I'm so thankful for everyone who came out on Saturday. I saw many of you at the NorseForged booth. Oh! We still haven't raffled off the sword because I wasn't able to be there to take more names for Sunday, but Norse will make a video about that soon. It was a pleasure having Creature Preacher MC for us!! All of our performers were so amazing and I loved the contests. The climbing tower looked like a great time too! The afterparty was so fun too! I loved spinning fire with the other performers. And dancing to Withering Earth with everyone! I'll be sure to highlight all the events in the following weeks of the performers, music, and our little makeshift Nerd Prom. Sunday we shifted the mead to the pavilion and turned it into a tavern, which was awesome. Nemeton rolled with the punches and moved their performances to the tavern and it was so GOOD. I heard such lovely feed back about the vendors and it was so fun watching people get slowly covered in new garb, haha. I didn't get to play, but I also heard that the Viking dodgeball over at Til Ragnarok was a blast.
As this was our first time at this location, I feel we learned A LOT about what we want to do next time. And yes! We will be at the same spot for 2026! We absolutely love the grounds and the team of the camp grounds. We listened to yall throughout the event and Norse is going to a restructure of the lay out! Plus so much more. Although, we are trying to decompress a little bit, it is so hard to not be completely excited for the next one now that we know where we will be!! We want to keep what worked and change what didn't. Now that we have a solid year to plan, we are going to much better by getting information out and so much more organization of the event. So, thank you to all our people and guests who are growing with us. Also, as I've said before, we are simply a group of friends trying to put on events. We are slowly, but surely, learning the skill tree that is event planning and the only way to do that is by ~doing it~.
Our team will be doing blogs throughout the year now, with updates, behind the scenes of the gatherings, and our next date announcements! We are signing off on Monday the date for NorseForged Gathering 6! 2026! So prepare your butts for that! We are soooo excited to plan the 6th gathering of nerds and have so much time to make it the best gathering yet. We also have some news on upcoming micro events!!! So be show to sign up on our emailing list to get all the updates from us!
We had such a great adventurer group of creators this year and I want to thank them for bringing their own unique magic to our gathering. We going to be making blogs, posts, and videos discussing more about the gathering and shouts outs too. For now I'll wrap this up and go decompress a bit haha.
k love you bye!