svava's Whim Tourney. This was a piece of delicious silliness, and quite a bit of fun for everyone. It was a round-robin tournament (since there were only ten entrants), and in each round the combatant was given two daggers. In order to earn a better weapons form, their consort had to answer a trivia question. Questions were drawn from both SCA and real history and culture, and were broken down into "easy", "medium" and "in case Katherine Stanhope enters". So we spent a fair bit of the morning shooting the breeze with
marysdress (who was organizing the questions), and tossing ideas at her. Of course, most of our questions were harder than we expected -- the danger of a bunch of old-timers trying to define an "easy" question, and generally not taking "standing in front of a crowd" brain freeze into account. But it generally went fine, because answering the questions accurately was far less important than amusing Svava, and they were very generous in accepting answers: a Good answer was at least as appropriate as a Right one.Anyway, if the consort's answer was accepted (which it was about 80% of the time), they got to reach into The Bag of Weapons, and choose a weapons form at random. But of course, half of them weren't simple things like "Sword and Shield" or "Spear". Instead, there were things like "Spear Wrestling" (which overrode what other weapons forms were chosen), "Dizzy Sword" (one-sword, but you have to spin around it five times before the bout starts), and the crowd favorite, "T-Rex". The latter was nice and straightforward, except that each fighter's arms were bungee corded to their body. Polearm worked poorly, spear not *too* badly. No one wound up trying two-sword, which is too bad only in that it probably would have been remarkably funny. (Fortunately, everyone grasped that winning was *not* the point of this tournament.)
Aside from that, the weekend was a bit of everything: a little shopping here, some hanging out with friends there, my share of the Thrown Weapons throw, a couple of hours at the Carolingian encampment at the engagement party for
rising_moon and dreda, lots of time hanging out with Lochleven, and generally a good mellow time. The event was a tad crowded (last year was ~750 people; this year cracked 1000 and kept going), but nonetheless a *lot* of fun, and just what I needed... 