Late Night Dungeon Flashback!

 Dungeon Crawl  No Responses »
Apr 052012
 

Last night our heroes were a mighty and successful band of adventurers at the end of their long careers:

  • Jack Druce (Introvert Def Jam) as dwarven Paladin Gold Pockets Petersen, show-biz agent to the dungeoneering stars with an itchty dagger finger set off by mime;
  • Toby Halligan (Dr. Toby Halligan is not a Doctor, Political Asylum’s Late Night Riot!) as Matsumoto, a Gen-Y Samurai who tweeted and Facebooked his every kill, but who would be shamed into ritual suicide if he was not retweeted;
  • Jimmy James Eaton (One Small Sketch For Man) as Dirty Old Gandalf (D.O.G.), the hip-hop wizard whose spells were as tight as his rhymes – though he could not cast spells in the presence of cats;
  • Celia Pacquola (Tie Her To The Tracks, Delayed) as Yelp, the crone who everyone thinks is ugly, but really she’s just had something stuck in her eye for fifty years; she has premonitions of past events, and there’s a secret bat in her hair which she’s never noticed.

The party had been persuaded to come out of retirement to kill one last villain: an evil sorceress. Successfully infiltrating her lair, they are trapped in a slow crushing walls trap, but as seasoned adventurers they’ve seen it all before. They take a moment to rest, and reminisce about their first ever adventure…

Many years before, the quartet were apprenticing as adventurers in their village of Josefsen when a young girl – special guest star Geraldine Quinn (Titters, Spandex Ballet) – pleaded with them to find her missing sheep, Damian, who was not only her best friend, but Josefsen’s only Justice of the Peace. The heroes investigated the nearby sheep paddock and found it suspiciously empty; they retired for a nice pot of chai while waiting to see if the sheep returned on their own. They did not – but our heroes’ chai-sharpened senses reveal a mysterious set of tracks leading into the nearby woods. There the party faced their first challenge – a huge but emaciated wolf! While Gandalf distracted the wolf with a rap about positive body image, the others managed to kill it, but it becomes clear it has eaten nothing in recent times – certainly not a plump sheep. They follow the tracks further to an ominous cabin in the woods, where they find a key hidden behind a picture of another sheep which unlocks a hidden trapdoor. Descending into darkness, they encountered a dead cat, temporarily robbing D.O.G. of his powers – a cat killed by the giant rat who guards the underground passage! The rat is despondent, however: not only is it a genetically modified mutant with a hideous face and rabbit’s ears, but it has been supplanted by its master’s new pet. They get the rat on side and it leaves them to face the wizard behind it all! The wizard is quite happy to show them the sheep…because he had turned it and the other sheep into a horrifying sheep golem! Battle is joined, Yelp discovers the bat in her hair, and the others manage to kill the beast. They cut out the parts that were once Damian, and return them to the young girl, running off before she realises her sheep is dead – and therefore not hearing her bloody swear of vengeance…

Back in the present, the adventurers realise the crushing walls are only mimed, causing Gold Pockets to pull his knife. They walk right through them and confront the sorceress – who turns out to be Damian’s owner, all grown up and thoroughly evil in her twisted desire for revenge! She begins a foul ritual, summoning something from a vile black cloud; Matsumoto tweets that he is going to slash at the sorceress, but his followers, tired of him repeating himself, do not retweet him, and he commits sepuku, aided by Yelp. As his entrails spill onto the floor, the blood of a hero disrupts the foul sigils there powering the ritual, and instead of a vicious sheep monster, the clouds bring forth…a perfect, unsullied copy of Damian! Finally having redeemed a villain instead of killing her, the heroes are happy to retire; G.O.D. records a motivational album for the kids, Yelp uses her newfound skill at decapitation to become an execution in the employ of King Joffrey Baratheon, and Gold Pockets sells the watch he stole from Matsumoto’s corpse to fund his pension. All is well at last!

Thanks to all who came along and enjoyed the show – come back next week for another amazing line-up, including Andrew McClelland (Tie Her To The Tracks, One Man Stand), Dave Bloustien (The Social Contract, Grand Guignol), Brenna Courtney Glazebrook (Better Than This) and first-time crawlers Christophe Davidson (The Time of Your Life) and Dingo & Wolf (Winning at Life)!

The first Dungeon Crawl of the year…

 Comedy, Dungeon Crawl  No Responses »
Feb 102012
 
For our first time back in 2012, we were joined by three great guest players, all of whom previous players:
  • Nadia Collins played Gnome Chomsky, a well read intellectual anarchist gnome with +5 intelligence, -5 charisma and the ability to create illusions with his mind.
  • Sean Fabri created Quadlo, a fastidious, obese Eunuch and monk. His favourite “poison” was “castrati”, i.e. he killed people by castrating them.
  • Geraldine Quinn donned the helmet to become Weibke Llarssonssonsson, a Valkyrie with an automatic license and a courier sticker for her mini-van that lets her park almost anywhere. (Valkyries are, of course, couriers for the souls of fallen warriors.)
The Lord of the Elves, Twinkletoes, summons the heroes to his mountain home to charge them with a quest to rid the world of an artefact of great evil: a duck-handled umbrella named Brian. It can only be destroyed by returning it to the Target from which it had been bought – a nigh impossible task, since not only is the Target at the top of a forbidding mountain range, but Twinkletoes has lost his receipt.
Promised a fabulous reward, our heroes set out in Weibke’s car, though they are soon forced to abandon it to penetrate the forbidding forests at the foot of the mountains. There they face an ogre who really just wanted to go to university, whom Gnome persuades to follow his intellectual dreams, and a stone face guarding the entrance to the mountain with a puzzle involving glyphs of bizarre creatures and cake. Deciding that the cake is a lie, the adventurers press one of the other glyphs – only to be told be the stone face that they could have pressed any of them, since he just made up the puzzle to stave off boredom.
At the top of the mountain, a frightening beholder threatened the party until Qadlo found a way to use his skills upon it, and they entered the Target to face their final foe: an evil sales wizard. All along the way they also tried to fight off the corrupting influence of Brian, which when opened unleashed Beiber Fever, an unholy love of the music of Justin Beiber. Only Weibke seemed immune, though as a Valkyrie she was used to having the screaming voices of death and madness in her mind at all times anyway.
Gnome having created the illusion of a receipt, the heroes successfully returned Brian to the evil wizard, and returned for their reward. Twinkletoes offered them anything from a basket of knick-knacks he found lying around the castle; none seemed interested in the “Crown of Granting You Anything You Wish”. Chomsky claimed “Charisma” as his prize (this was clarified to be Charisma Carpenter, the actress), Qualdo was happy with an entirely non-magical length of rope, and Weibke chose as her reward a petrol voucher to fill her car after the drive to mount Target.
All in all, a corker of a show, but don’t just take my word for it: check out the photos below, thane as always by the amazing Robert W Young. Plus you can read this review from audience member and performer Katherine Phelps – who provided us with a perfect instrument of evil in her umbrella!

All Hallow’s Evil

 Comedy, Dungeon Crawl  No Responses »
Oct 312011
 

It’s close to midnight…and something evil’s lurking in the dark! Well, that’s often the case at Dungeon Crawl, but this week is Halloween – All Hallow’s Eve – and so this Wednesday the creepy, spooky, even the kooky are coming out to play. (Yes yes, I know it’s a modern commercial bastardisation of Samhain, and that in the southern hemisphere it should be happening at the start of May, but let’s not bring Pagan politics into it.)

Four brave adventurers – Toby Halligan, Amanda Buckley, Nick Caddaye and Geraldine Quinn – will strap on the armour and pick up the sword, wand, bow or magical thingamebob in order to ward off the forces of darkness that emerge at this time of year. Like, um…sunshine? Redbacks? Yes! But more evil. Like…giant redbacks!

Whatever those horrors may be, you can be sure your Dungeon Master Ben McKenzie won’t make it easy for your heroes. Certainly, he has plans to be as horrible as his usual minion Richard McKenzie, who can’t be with us this month as he will be suffering unspeakable torment in the ninth circle of Carceri! Or on holiday on a tropical island, it’s hard to say. But in any case, standing in will be the redoubtable yet surprisingly evil Sean Fabri.

As usual, it all kicks off at 8:30 PM at the Bella Union. Doors open from 8, tickets $15 on the door or $14 in advance from bellaunion.com.au. This is our second last one for the year, and we’re taking a break in January, so let’s make it a big one!

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