I don’t often preen, but I am going to now because there’s quite I bit of things worthy of preening from Twelfth Night.

At the risk of sounding immodest, I was an A&S god at Twelfth Night (as if there’s a way that sentence could be anything but immodest).

I judged the bardic contest, and did some teaching related to that.

I entered and won the Requiem for a Huscarl-inspired A&S contest. I entered my attempt to re-write the song as if I had lived in 1067 and wanted to remember the battle. My version was in Old English, in the Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetic style, and I’m pretty pleased with it. I learned a ton about actually writing in Old English, and had a great deal of fun playing with words and word choices. It was a fun exercise in re-creation archaeology.

I wrote a pretty spiffy scroll text for Damien’s knighting. I thought it was pretty good, but the number of people that came up and said it was great has made me revise my opinion upwards. Damien said it was the best scroll text evah, though I still lean towards Maerwynn’s county scroll on that 🙂

I also performed a portion of Beowulf at feast for Maerwynn. This was the portion where Wealhtheow comes into the mead-hall and offers the cup in proper order to Hrothgar, Beowulf, and the lords in the hall. I did it in both Old and Modern English. I did not have time to properly memorize it, but I had gone over it enough that I was told it did not sound like I was simply reciting it. Several people told me they thought it was a great touch to feast, and that makes me preen a wee bit more. Maerwynn, however, chastised me, because she says she’s not perfect, as I said in the performance. In this one thing, Your Majesty, I am forced to disagree 🙂

For an Anglo-Saxon word-smith type, there’s not much more I could have done in one weekend. I worked in Old English, taking me one step closer to understanding what it is to be a scop, and I really think I made the event better for not just me, but for a number of others as well. For all of that, I think that this one time, I get some justifiable preening.

I’m combining my event reports for Quest for the Grail and Three Rivers Carousel because these two events tried to do something similar, though the execution was very different. Both of these events had people engage in a variety of engagements and both were similar to an event idea I’ve been tossing around. I’m very glad to have gone to these as I’ve learned how to improve my own event.

The Quest for the Grail was in Forgotten Sea on Memorial Day at the Lilies site. It was sort of a Lilies test-run. The fighting on Saturday was structured around a series of fights in the woods. Each team consisted of 3 or more people, with 3 fighters active at a time. We proceeded down the path of the woods, encountering opposing fighters, many with different attributes, puzzles, or demeanors. Overall, the opponents represented the seven deadly sins. Most interesting was Sir Thjo’s team who were Anger and Sir Duncan Bruce of Logan’s team which was Sloth. Can’t forget Her Excellency Yasamin, and a horde of beautiful women represented Lust. Most humorous was Sir Colin who was given an immense amount of padding making him look fat as he was gluttony.

It was a beautiful day for a walk in the woods. The teams were allowed into the woods separately and we were one of the last teams in. We were read a preliminary bit and given a shield with a white cloth. We then proceeded in the woods. The white cloth was given so that whenever we lost a fight, or in other words lost to a deadly sin. If you were pure and innocent, like Galahad, your shield remained white. If not, your shield was marked up and unclean. So after every fight we lost, the winning sin would write something on the shield. These writings were supposed to hint at the fact that they were a deadly sin.

At the end, we were quizzed by the final guardians, St. Peter and two archangels. We were asked by them what the nature of the fighting had been. We hadn’t been smart enough to look at the big picture, nor had we been smart enough to read what had been written on our shield, so when we were asked if we knew that our opponents had been the seven deadly sins, we had no clue. We weren’t the only ones, as I don’t know if anyone guessed it correctly. Nevertheless, it was a very good time, but during the trek I couldn’t help but wish that more of the fighting encounters were also puzzles where we could talk our way through them. I suppose that’s me.

The Carousel event was a series of games. We did pretty well in every event, not necessarily the best in each event, but consistently scored well. In the end, we won.We started with Bardic part, which was their take on Whose Line Is It Anyway. They tasked us with coming up with a Irish Hoedown. They said we got bonus points if we involved beer and pretzels, so I gave them each a beer. That sort of started the day off in the manner it deserved, with our team cheating, bribing, and doing whatever we could to win.

The other events was playing a large version of Cathedral, a jousting game where blindfolded people pushed a blindfolded rider on this wagon horse guided by other team members to hit a ring, a spear contest hitting a series of targets in numerical order (including pi), a sheep-herding game using shepherd’s crooks to get balloons into a pen at the end of a maze, and shooting a trebuchet at a giant troll. We did pretty well in the Calontir trivia, answering questions that Master Brummbar developed and some of the questions were very obscure, like who was the first native Calontir peer and who was the first Calontir Pelican. We didn’t do as well in the Speed Heraldry, which was kind of surprising but it was a very tough event. We did pretty well in the both the target archery and the combat archery, which since we had Baron Jon Tristram was not too surprising.

The fighting portion was a combination of several things. It was ultimately a fight between the team and three previous Baronial fighting champions. We were asked trivia questions about Three Rivers, which the more we answered limited the weapons the fighting champions could use. We answered all 3, limiting the champions to single sword. Also, you could shoot at a target to try and take limbs away from the fighters. As many team members could shoot 3 shots as you wanted, but the baronial archer champions got 2 shots per team shooters to restore the limbs. Tristram hit one leg and so did Ben, who was a teenager who joined us midway through, but the archer champion restored them. We then fought, with Dongal and I facing Eric, Raud, and Josef. I killed Eric with a thrust to the throat with my axe, but I really was suffering in the heat. I had done 3 pickups with Dongal prior to the fighting as I was overheating. It was 97 and very humid with little wind and I was suffering. At about the same time I killed Eric, a hold was called. I decided to stop fighting because I was feeling nauseous.

Despite my wussiness, I don’t think there’s enough fighting. Part of the problem is that I was in armor running around doing other events for a couple of hours before we got to the fighting. I should have fought earlier, and done the games later.

Somewhere between the Grail and Carousel is a wonderful, balanced event. I’m going to play around and see if I can come up with it.