Renaissance Festival War Stories Sept 2/3/4, 2023

For Weekend Two's Stories

We look like we are about to drop the hottest album of the year.

The Band: The Sidequest Players. The Album: People and Tales. First single: Come Guess Me...

Lead singer and tambourine: Rosie

Rhythm guitar and back up vocals: Tinka Boudit

Keyboard and vocals: Clover the Curious (Not Pictured)

Main percussion and shaker: Peter Penwell

Lead Guitar: Query the Riddlemaster

Bass Player: Nestor The Cruel

Shamisen: Yuzaha (Not pictured)

...If the band thing doesn't work out, there's always superhero-ing.

This weekend brought one of the hottest Labor Day weekends in recent memory.

The entire week leading up to it was physically and mentally preparing for the heat: pre-hydrating, eating right, the right garb, access to water the day of, good sleep. This heat was intense.

We stuck together and got through it. It was hard, challenging, and stupid. These are just some tales of how we dealt with it...

...

To the health of His Majesty...

King Henry has been someone we've liked to play with over the last couple years. He claims to be not fond of riddles, so we made sure to make sure we have more playful content for him. We have made ourselves the "Premier experts on King Henry trivia." It usually starts with something fairly benign like saying he's ambidextrous or on his minted coins he appears slightly sweaty, but then it gets weird. When we told him we have ELEVEN pages of this 'trivia' he doubled over with shock. Some of the fun ones talk about how strong and lovable he is, and some are just plain ridiculous.

You'd think the material alone would be enough to have fun with (with, not at) him, but no, that was just to lull him into a false sense of comfort. There were two specific moments with His Majesty...

Sunday, Rosie told a pair of young women as a sidequest, "Ask King Henry which son is his favorite," while we were in sight of him. My jaw dropped at her cunning. We then watched these young women from a distance ask him. We couldn't hear the conversation, but we saw it. The hesitation, the watch checking, the biting of his own hand, and then the death stare from Henry to us...Golden. Then there was the approach that filled me with genuine fear, pretending to do something else like shower or read a book upside down, and heart palpitations...priceless.

Monday, Peter suggested as a quest seeking out members of the Shakespeare Guild and asking them for their 24 lines of Shakespeare. This boy and his mother did so; they spoke for some time.

Afterwards, they got ice cream. The Sidequest Players were not invited. We respect that choice.

...

The interest in sidequests are growing and getting more interesting.

A guest story from Gus The Bard.

Sunday, I brought bananas for the Cottage Crew for breakfast. One of them ended up getting stuck in the sun, and no one wanted it. So we we just kept moving it into the sun so it was getting hotter and hotter throughout the day.

After a while, we started making bad jokes about our "Hot Banana", just becoming more and more childish as the day went on.

It might have been the heat or exhaustion, but we started calling it the "Legendary Hot Banana" and told The Sidequest Players to start sending people over on quests to come find it... no one did, but it was still a fun way to keep ourselves from thinking about the heat too much.

On Monday, the "Hot Banana" became the "Room Temperature Mushy Banana". We still had the quest in at the booth so we collectively decided to have even MORE stupid fun with the concept. Whenever someone came to do the quest to find the Legendary Fruit, we played it up to be more serious than it was. "I'm so sorry the burden of this quest was put upon you." Or "You know not of the weight of what you ask! What you seek is no mere fruit." Ect.

We even wrote a song to punctuate how "dire" their quest was.

After some brainstorming, the quest has been updated. I'll be replacing the Hot Banana with a plastic one, and it'll just be the "Magic Banana". There will also be a small prize for patrons who come and have to sit through the song.

Find more on Tinka Boudit

Find more on The Sidequest Players

See you in weekend 4...