Thank You For Questing

Thank You For Questing is a mostly improvised fantasy role-playing show, and the improvising is the point. Three heroes carry the story: Parsnip, Acryllis and Twinkle. Their world takes cues from the calendar, with a Christmas Town on the map and a closing arc titled New Year's Resolutions. Other stops are stranger. Across two episodes at Happy Mouse Park, the party secures tickets, books a table for four while explaining that three are coming and they need two chairs, and weighs the Starry Starry Space Coaster against Buccaneers of the Bahamas until a cloaked figure peeks at them from around a corner. Dice decide what holds. With time running short, the group rigs a trap from a crate and salvaged bird parts, and each player has to roll for their own share of the contraption. The talk around the table is a large part of the appeal. One session starts with a player who cannot find any dice, until someone points out that a search engine will roll a twenty-sided die on request. A scene aboard a flight slides into a cast member's real memory of landing before Crazy Rich Asians had finished, and from there into who went to college and what they studied. Acryllis, who can pull an extendable scroll from his wrist and etch it with laser eyesight, starts telling a tale about a lonely prillic one page at a time while someone pleads with the table not to let him. The plot has real turns too. In one 'previously on' opening, Holly appears at the mouth of a cave, everything shatters, and the heroes come to in separate places, one opening the windows of a shop and another looking up from a creek as if waking from a dream. Episodes labelled OOC, short for out of character, set the fiction aside. 'OOC # 4 - Total Recap' kicks off with an improv warm-up, admits the cast are not the people for a quick recap, then runs back through a tower in the sea full of orbs, an angered sea god named Lur, and a clipboard-assisted legal escape from being lowered into the ocean. The story does reach a finale, and the cast marks it by having everyone name something they remember from the run. In 'OOC - Just One More', Omar starts alone on a rainy night in what he calls the real-life version of Willow Creek, thanking supporters and recalling a mountaintop of observatories that matched a memory he had carried since childhood. Another sign-off asks everyone to stay healthy and stay indoors, and offers the theater of the mind as company in the meantime. The register runs giddy and loose, full of chants, accents and repeated goodbyes, yet the thanks sound sincere. It suits a listener who wants comic fantasy play that still sees its story through, and Happy Mouse Park is a fine place to hear the cast at full tilt.