Hogwarts and the Draconian Prophecy

On September 9th I assisted in Team Snout's latest game, Hogwarts and the Draconian Prophecy. The game took place over the weekend of Sept 9-10, mostly in Sacramento. If you're unfamiliar with the bay area treasure hunt game tradition, wikipedia has an excellent background.

For this game, I took on the role of Hagrid (I have an excellent costume that I created originally for one of Britta's Harry Potter parties). My job was to teach three classes of Care of Magical Creatures. Really, the "class" was just an excuse to give teams their next clue, which when solved would tell them where to go next.

The game started off with a sorting ceremony where the teams were sorted into their four houses. The teams were also divided into third, fourth, and fifth year classes (depending on team experience level). Then the students embarked aboard the Hogwarts Express, which in this case was an Amtrak train leaving from Emeryville, which arrived in Sacramento around 11:30am. The teams had to solve their first clues on the train ride, which told them which class to go to first, and its location. There were three classes: Care of Magical Creatures, Potions, and Defense Against The Dark Arts (which mainly served to introduce students to their "wands", a very cool electronic device created by the wizards of Team Snout which could be used to spell out words).

Each team received a textbook at the beginning of their first class, which was a 191-page paperback-bound book written completely by the game designers. It included sections on potions, wand casting, and magical creatures, as well as other useful reference material for clues throughout the game.

The Care of Magical Creatures clue was pretty straightforward, although time consuming. The handbook contained a list of 26 creatures with descriptions, one for each letter of the alphabet (Acromantula, Basilisk, etc). The clue was an audio clue, consisting of sounds that the creatures might make. So for a Basilisk for example (described as a snakelike creature with the crested feathers of a chicken on its head), the sound was a cross between snake's hissing and a rooster crowing. By listening to the sounds in sequence, and matching them up with their corresponding creature, the teams could get letters which spelled out their next destination.

I started each class with a few warm-up questions about the magical creatures in the book. My favorite question was, "name three magical creatures that would make a good pet for a wizard", for which I would accept any answer and then respond, "Correct! Of course, in my opinion they ALL make great pets!" For correct answers (and any other helpful behavior) I had a pouch of House Points tokens to hand out as I saw fit. Since I was the "nice" teacher (the other two teachers were a bit stricter/grumpier), I got to dole out the tokens left and right. Basically, if a team did or said something I liked (or Hagrid would have liked), they usually got some points. Teachers were of course also allowed to take points from students for misbehaving or causing trouble, but I almost never did that.

A few of the more memorable moments of the classes:

• I was freely giving out house points to any team who showed an appreciation for Magical Creatures. So if your team was carrying around a stuffed fish as a mascot (as one team was), that was worth a few house points. One team all had T-shirts with Trogdor The Burninator on them, so I came over and announced I was giving them bonus house points since their shirts had a picture of a dragon on them. Little did I know that the team at the next table over had overheard this exchange. Around five minutes later, I was called over to their table, where one of the team members pointed proudly to his chest. The team had sketched, using a red sharpie or fabric pen, the outline of a dragon on his previously-blank white T-shirt. So of course I had to give them some points for that!
  
  
• By coincidence, it turned out that there was a dog-training class that met that day in the same courtyard we were using as our "classroom". It was a class for guide-dogs-in-training, and before long were around a dozen young adolescent puppies and their caretakers. As it turned out, this worked out well for both classes however. The dog trainers were happy to give the dogs some extra training in ignoring loud noises (screeching harpies and basilisks that were echoing throughout the courtyard) and interacting with scary figures (Hagrid, with huge beard and covered in layers of fur, is definitely an imposing figure and good training for the dogs to not freak out and bark). So I got to pet a bunch of cute puppies. Of course, I told all the students that these were magical creatures that were highly intelligent and potentially dangerous, and they should only approached if they dared.
  
  
• An old friend of mine who I did summer stock theater with literally 13 years ago actually RECOGNIZED me underneath all the Hagrid beard and fur and said hello. I was so shocked by this that I completely forgot to give him some house points. I guess he must have recognized my voice (which is fairly recognizable, even when putting on a fake Scottish accent).
  
  
• When flipping through the "textbook", many students noticed that the back of the book had an "autographs" section which was designed to be signed like a yearbook. As a result, many students came up and asked me for my autograph, which of course tickled me to death. The first student to do this per class got some house points (and many of the others got some too if they were particularly clever in how they asked). In particular, one student told me at the end of the last class that I had been his favorite teacher, and actually GAVE ME AN APPLE. That pretty much made my week right there.
  

In all, it was an excellent way to spend a Saturday. I was a bit sorry I didn't stay longer to help out with the rest of the game, since I had a great time chatting with various very folks at Game Control after the classes finished. Including, as it turned out, a guy I used to sing with in Stanford Chamber Chorale with back in the day (he was playing the role of the Potions teacher). It started with a, "you look familiar, do I know you?" moment, and then after much reconstruction of hazy memories we realized that not only had we sung in the group together at the same time, but we'd performed in a Broadway revue type show together, where we'd sung the same song in a scene together (I'd played his elderly father), and he had actually sat on my lap! So it's always amusing to bump into someone who looks familiar and then eventually realize... "Hey, you sat on my lap onstage!".

But anyway, there were a ton of volunteers helping out at that point, and things were so well-organized that they really didn't need my help. And in a way, I sort of like getting my fix of The Game in smaller doses of a few hours at a time (mostly by attending playtesting parties where I just test the clues in a relatively low-stress environment). The one-day games I've done in the past have been pretty exhausting, so the idea of going for more than 24 hours straight is a bit intimidating. I might be convinced into it some day with the right team though, who knows.