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!
