We took our Portal to Discworld to Fantasy Forest again this year at Sudeley Castle over the weekend of 19th-20th July. This was our third year at the event and while it was very hard work it was a lot of fun. We got to speak to many hundreds if not thousands of people about Terry.
We gave visitors to the portal the chance to:
- View the Fool Guild Hall of Faces (the Clown Egg Register for the Fools Guild which is based on the roundworld Clown Egg Register that is run by Clowns International).
- Take part in an investigation of Mistress Weatherwax's pantry
- Paint their own clown's egg face on an egg they could then take away
- Create their own witches shambles (and learn all about them)
- Colour in some of our colouring sheets
- Visit a small part of our Discworld artefacts museum (this time, the script, shooting sheets and the final Blu-ray of the fan made film Troll Bridge) which we had placed in front of our giant 100 inch square poster of Mica from the film
- The chance to look at hundreds of photos we have of Terry at various fan events, this gave us and visitors an opportunity to talk all about Terry
- Have their iconograph taken with our full size Luggage (with or without Rincewind)
We were lucky to be part of Fantasy Forest's Journey Quest and took part in trinket trading with the general public.
Some of our team dressed as various Discworld characters. So we had Granny, Rincewind, Ridcully, and a number of watchmen, witches and fools. Twice over the weekend the Suffrajesters took to the lawns of Fantasy Forest to complain that the Fools Guild would not let women into their ranks. Chants of Jokes for Women and Women can be funny too echoed around the fields.
With the new Discworld Table Top Roleplay game Adventures in Ankh-Morpork coming soon, we decided to run a couple of sessions of the starter adventure that came with the free starter pack. So on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon, six brave visitors, each took on one of the pre-rolled characters and Rincewind GM'd the adventure. Rincewind certainly enjoyed himself and I think the players also had a lot of fun. The system is nice and simple and allows the GM and players to work out the adventure using Narrativia. Bad puns were rewarded and many a laugh was had. If that doesn't feel like Discworld then I don't know what would. (What I didn't realise while I was running one of the sessions was that one of the playtesters that works for Modiphus visited our portal and was very pleased to see the game being played "in the wild". He said he would tell the writer of the game system that Rincewind was running his adventure!)
We were also visited by a previous ex-egg painter from Clowns International, Debbie Smith, who was very happy to see our Egg Register homage with a number of Eggs painted by members of our crew. It's lovely to get validation from people that do the job for real.
On Sunday we had a visit from Marc Burrows who had earlier that day performed his show The Magic of Terry Pratchett on a rather wet stage. Sadly we were busy working so we couldn't get over to watch it. We did signpost people to it when we could.
We had so much fun spotting Discworld cosplayers in the wild. We had several visits from Death, the Watch, Nanny and various Twoflowers.
So, after two very long, very warm (and quite wet outside) days we packed down the Portal for now. It was a huge amount of fun and seeing all the smiling happy faces of fans made all the effort worthwhile.
Fantasy Forest will return twice next year once at Sudeley Castle (the same location as this and previous years) and then in September in Heartfordshire.
See the Fantasy Forest website for more details and also the new Fantasy Forest Libertailia website.