Wednesday, June 5, 2019

On Questing at ToC 26: An Interview

 William "RuBarb" Moore, one of the event-holders for ToC 26 who ran the questing portions of the event, was interviewed by Jason "Aeston" Rosa on Saturday at ToC 26 about the night quests planned for the weekend. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity.

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Q: Alright, can you start by describing the plot of the night quests this weekend for us?

So, the plot of this one is people are travelling into different worlds. It’s kind of based off the movie Stargate a little bit, there is a god that is coming down and taking these villagers and turning them into his army, and they now just recently got access to the Realms, and now the Realms is going in and trying to defeat the god currently.


Q: So throwing a night quest for a very large population of people like you get at Tournies must be a challenge. What are the ways that you deal with that particular challenge?

Well, actually it hasn’t been that bad for the most part. Usually with Demonic Invasion I split it up into three different groups. Here it was a little challenging last night, we had a large group coming out. But it’s just like a combination of having the puzzles that are out there, having some combat out there, and then sort of even changing the dynamics of the actual combat, so throwing in new creatures that have different effects so then the people that weren’t involved before now start getting involved. And then putting some puzzles and riddles and things like that out there.


Q: Are there any particular members of your team that you would describe as incredibly valuable to you? What do they do that makes your job easier?

Josh and Craig, I relied on them very heavily last night to sort of take charge and learn the plot for the night. And they took it and ran the NPCs, we didn’t make any changes to the stats or anything like that all night so I think it ran pretty well. I relied heavily on them because I was with the PCs being a PC/NPC for the night and we barely talked, they ran it very well and I was very happy to have them on my team.


Q: Are there any props or special effects you’re especially proud of for this weekend?
The gate is the biggest one that I’ve spent hundreds of hours into, it lights up with LEDs and everything like that. There’s the pyramid puzzle, that was cool, that was released at Feast of Creathorne, which has ley lines and they all interconnect, it’s like thirteen different pieces that all create a pyramid at the end. I spent a lot of time building props in general, there are scrolls out there that they need to decipher with different runes and different symbols and stuff like that. But yeah, probably the gate is the most time-consuming and impressive one.


Q: And last question, why do you think that this event is a particularly great place to throw questing?

Just the people. Honestly, I think, you just have a different dynamic of all the different groups around here and I think it’s interesting to see how people really react and change and bring their mindset into the situation. So like, someone has an idea and then another one bounces off another idea and then they figure it out together, and I think that’s really kind of what I do it for, I do it to entertain people and have people have a good time, so I think that’s what makes the event special for me.


Photo by Jason Rosa

Photo by Jason Rosa