The Reluctant Questmaster

When the email first appeared in my inbox with the subject line "URGENT: Questmaster Needed," I should have deleted it immediately. Anyone with a functioning frontal lobe knows that emails marked "urgent" in all caps are either Nigerian princes or your mother-in-law. But in my defense, I was three cups of coffee into a Tuesday morning spreadsheet binge, and the mental fog was thick.

So I opened it.

"Dear Mr. Holloway," it began, perfectly formal despite the screaming subject line. "Due to an unfortunate incident involving our previously appointed Questmaster and a severe allergic reaction to polyester tabards, we find ourselves in dire need of a replacement for this weekend's event. As your name was provided by Ms. Eleanor Chen as someone with 'extensive fantasy knowledge and moderate organizational skills,' we would be most grateful if you could fulfill this role."

The email continued with details about compensation—surprisingly generous—and ended with a request for immediate confirmation.

Now, two critical errors occurred at this point. First, I assumed "Questmaster" was some sort of trivia host, like a quizmaster but with a medieval flair. Second, I failed to recall that Eleanor—my colleague who apparently hated me enough to volunteer my weekend—had once overheard me explaining the difference between Gandalf the Grey and Gandalf the White to the IT guy.

I replied with a casual "Sure, sounds fun. What time should I arrive?"

Three days later, I stood in a muddy field seventy miles from civilization, wearing what can only be described as wizard cosplay, staring at a hand-drawn map that looked like the doodles of a caffeinated five-year-old.

"This isn't what I signed up for," I muttered, as a man wearing foam armor and carrying a PVC pipe wrapped in silver duct tape approached me with a reverence usually reserved for religious figures.

"Questmaster Holloway!" he boomed, dropping to one knee. "The Scarlet Company awaits your wisdom!" Behind him, a semicircle of adults in various states of fantasy dress nodded solemnly. One woman had blue face paint and what appeared to be actual antlers attached to her head.

"Right," I said, squinting at the name badge pinned to his foam breastplate. "Todd. Look, there's been a misunderstanding—"

"Lord Thaddeus," he corrected, still kneeling. "Captain of the Scarlet Company, defender of the Eastern Realms, slayer of the Wyrm of Doomhaven."

A light drizzle began to fall, dampening my rental wizard hat.

"Todd," I continued firmly, "I thought this was a pub quiz with a fantasy theme. You know, 'Who wrote The Hobbit?' and 'Name three houses from Game of Thrones.' I didn't realize it was..." I gestured vaguely at the surrounding campsite where people were setting up medieval-looking tents and unloading cases of Monster energy drinks.

"Live-Action Role-Playing," supplied a woman with waist-length braids and enough leather straps crossing her torso to confuse a BDSM convention. "The Kingdoms of Aldermere is the third-largest LARP organization in the Pacific Northwest."

"Right," I said. "Well, I'm afraid I can't—"

"We've already paid for your accommodations," said Todd/Thaddeus, rising to his feet with a squeak of foam. "And the previous Questmaster's allergic reaction means all the scenarios need to be reset. We have forty-seven players who've driven from five states, and the campaign begins in three hours."

I looked around at the expectant faces. Someone had brought a actual falcon, which regarded me with the same judgment I felt toward myself for not reading the email more carefully.

"What exactly does a Questmaster do?" I asked weakly.

The answer, as it turned out, was "everything."

"You're basically the dungeon master, but for real life," explained Eleanor's nephew Kevin, who materialized out of nowhere to serve as my reluctant guide. Kevin was seventeen, gangly, and the only person at the campsite not in costume, unless you counted his "Sword Art Online" hoodie as cosplay.

"Aunt Ellie said you've been playing D&D since the stone age," he continued, helping me sort through binders of laminated materials in a canvas tent that had been designated "Questmaster HQ."

"I played twice in college," I corrected. "And we ordered pizza, got drunk, and never made it past creating characters."

Kevin winced. "Don't tell them that. These people are... intense."

"No kidding." I flipped through a binder labeled "ENCOUNTER MATRICES" that contained spreadsheets more complex than anything I'd seen in fifteen years of corporate accounting. "Why aren't you playing?"

"I'm just here because my mom thinks it's better than me staying home playing video games all weekend." He shrugged. "Plus, I know how the game works. My job is to make sure the new Questmaster doesn't completely destroy the campaign's internal logic and cause a nerd riot."

"Comforting," I muttered, opening another binder to find detailed backstories for what appeared to be forty different fictional kingdoms, complete with hand-drawn coats of arms. "So what happens if I just... leave?"

Kevin looked at me with the pity reserved for the terminally naïve. "They've been planning this campaign for eight months. They've booked this entire campground. There are people here who built their vacation time around this weekend." He lowered his voice. "Todd refinanced his house to pay for the catering."

"That can't be true."

"The man has a tattoo of the Aldermere royal crest on his lower back. Trust me, he's committed."

I dropped my head into my hands, dislodging the ridiculous wizard hat. Outside, I could hear people shouting in what I assumed were fantasy accents as they continued setting up camp.

"Fine," I said eventually. "But you're helping me. What's the first thing I need to do?"

Kevin pulled out his phone and showed me a weather app. "Well, according to the storyline, the heroes are supposed to embark on their first quest at sunset. But it's going to rain heavily starting around 4 PM, so you should probably move everything up."

I stared at him. "You want me to reschedule the sunset?"

"No," Kevin said with exaggerated patience. "I want you to make a narrative justification for why the quest has to start earlier than planned. Like, I don't know, a prophecy or something."

"A prophecy," I repeated flatly.

"These people love prophecies," Kevin assured me. "Just make something up about the alignment of stars or whatever."

"I don't know anything about star alignments!"

"Neither do they," Kevin said, already typing on his phone. "I'll find something on Google. You just practice looking wise."

It turned out that "looking wise" primarily involved squinting thoughtfully into the middle distance while stroking my fake beard, which had been hastily attached to my face with spirit gum that I was pretty sure was causing a mild allergic reaction.

By some miracle, the prophecy gambit worked. I stood on a wooden platform, using my deepest voice to proclaim that "the Celestial Diamond has shifted in the heavens" (thanks, random astronomy blog) and "the hour of destiny approaches faster than the ancient texts foretold" (pure improvisation). The assembled LARPers ate it up, exchanging meaningful glances and clutching their foam weapons tighter.

And so forty-seven adults divided into five competing "companies" set out on a scavenger hunt through the woods, following clues I had hastily rewritten from the original Questmaster's notes. Kevin trailed behind me as I moved between different checkpoints, doing my best to remember which group was which and what their fictional motivations were supposed to be.

"The Emerald Sentinels are the eco-warriors, right?" I whispered to Kevin as a group approached wearing green cloaks.

"That's the Jade Wardens," he hissed back. "Emerald Sentinels are the elvish diplomats. Remember, they hate the dwarves because of the mining dispute."

"What mining dispute?"

"The one that's been going on for six campaigns! It's literally the central conflict of the entire continental politics!"

"Right," I said, and then louder, to the approaching group: "Hail, noble elves! How goes your... diplomatic mission?"

A woman with pointed ear prosthetics stepped forward. "Questmaster, we seek guidance. We have recovered the Orb of Truth, but the Crimson Brotherhood ambushed us and now claims it is rightfully theirs by ancient law."

I blinked. "The Crimson Brotherhood... those are the guys in red?"

"The Scarlet Company," Kevin muttered under his breath.

"Right, Todd's group," I said, immediately realizing my mistake as the elves gasped at my use of a real name.

"The Questmaster exists beyond our realm," Kevin improvised quickly. "He sees all identities, both in our world and beyond."

Nice save, I mouthed to him, before turning back to the elves. "The Orb of Truth, you say? Well... what does your heart tell you is the truth of ownership?"

The lead elf frowned. "That's... not really how this works. There needs to be a ruling based on the Ancient Codex."

"Which is...?"

"The rulebook," Kevin whispered. "Page 94."

I frantically flipped through the binder I'd been carrying, finding a page with a flowchart of item ownership disputes. It looked like a legal document drafted by someone with both a law degree and way too much free time.

"According to the Ancient Codex," I proclaimed after skimming it, "the Orb belongs to whoever... completed the Trial of Whispers to obtain it?"

"We did!" said one elf.

"But we intercepted them before they returned to their homeland," called a voice from the trees. Todd emerged with his red-clad followers. "By the Laws of Interception, page 111, paragraph 3, the spoils become contested!"

I flipped frantically to page 111 while the two groups stared each other down with foam weapons at the ready.

"There will be a test," I announced finally, making it up as I went. "Both groups must... um... compose a limerick about the Orb's power. Best limerick wins."

Kevin looked at me like I'd grown a second head, but to my surprise, both groups immediately huddled up and began whispering intensely.

"Limericks aren't in the rulebook," Kevin said under his breath.

"Neither is common sense, apparently, but here we are," I replied.

Five minutes of surprisingly competitive limerick-writing later, the Orb of Truth (which turned out to be a glass paperweight spray-painted gold) was awarded to the elves, whose rhyming of "power" with "finest hour" and "towers" showed marginally more creativity than the Scarlet Company's effort, which somehow managed to incorporate three separate phallic references.

"That was actually kind of brilliant," Kevin admitted as we trudged to the next checkpoint. "Creative problem-solving is part of being a good Questmaster."

"I was a theater kid before I was an accountant," I said. "Improvisation is just panic with style."

The rain that Kevin had predicted arrived right on schedule, but rather than dampening spirits, it seemed to enhance them. The LARPers pulled out period-appropriate oilcloth capes and continued their quests with increased dramatic intensity, as though the weather itself was part of the scenario. Which, thanks to my hasty "prophecy," they believed it was.

By nightfall, I was soaked, exhausted, and surprisingly invested in whether the Northern Alliance would successfully decode the runes that would lead them to the hidden temple (actually the campground's storage shed, redecorated with battery-powered "torches" and plastic skeletons).

"You're getting into this," Kevin observed as we watched from a distance while two factions engaged in an elaborate "battle" that involved a lot of gentle tapping with foam weapons and dramatically theatrical deaths.

"It's completely ridiculous," I said, "but I have to admit, they're having genuine fun. When was the last time you saw adults play with this much enthusiasm?"

"Never," Kevin admitted. "It's kind of cool, in a deeply weird way."

"Exactly." I adjusted my increasingly bedraggled wizard hat. "Deeply weird, but cool. Like jazz, or molecular gastronomy."

Sunday morning arrived with sunshine and the ceremonial awarding of "experience points" based on each group's performance in the weekend's quests. I had stayed up until 2 AM with Kevin, calculating scores based on a mathematical formula that would make Einstein weep with confusion.

"The Questmaster will now bestow the final blessings," announced Todd, who had somehow maintained perfect foam-armor posture despite having slept in a tent during a thunderstorm.

I stepped forward, my fake beard hanging by a single patch of spirit gum, my rented robe now several shades darker from mud and rain.

"Brave adventurers," I began, surprising myself with how easily the fantasy patter now came to me, "you have all proven yourselves worthy of the Kingdoms of Aldermere. The prophecies have been fulfilled, the ancient evils temporarily banished." I paused, looking at their eager faces. "But as we all know, darkness never sleeps for long. It merely... waits for the next campaign."

A cheer went up from the assembled players. I caught Kevin's eye, and he gave me a thumbs-up.

After the closing ceremonies, as tents were being dismantled and foam weapons carefully packed away, Todd approached me without his character's pompous bearing.

"Thanks for stepping in," he said, extending a hand. "Eleanor said you'd be good, but we didn't expect you to get so... involved."

I shook his hand, surprised to find myself genuinely pleased by the compliment. "Honestly, when I realized what I'd gotten myself into, I nearly ran for the hills. This isn't what I signed up for."

"But?" Todd prompted.

"But it was actually fun. In a completely insane way."

Todd grinned. "That's pretty much our motto." He hesitated. "Our next campaign is in three months. Winter setting, ice trolls, the whole thing. We could use a Questmaster who thinks on his feet."

I thought about my usual weekends: spreadsheets, Netflix, occasional trips to Home Depot. Then I thought about the look on the Northern Alliance's faces when they'd finally decoded those runes.

"I'll bring a warmer wizard hat," I said.

Todd beamed, and behind him, I saw Kevin shaking his head in disbelief.

Maybe Eleanor hadn't been trying to punish me after all. Maybe, in her own weird way, she'd been trying to save me from the monotony I hadn't even realized I was drowning in.

As I packed up the Questmaster binders, I made a mental note to thank her. And to ask what the hell a "polyester tabard" was, so I could avoid developing an allergic reaction myself. Some quests, it seemed, were worth embarking on twice.