(Please note, this praxis is in two parts. We did this because we had five players sacrifice many hours of prep and then several hours of standing in the brutal Chicago heat, in order to complete the task. Therefore, we wanted everyone to get credit for participating, since the task only has space for four collaborators. It has been divided into Part One, which covers all the prep work, and Part Two, which covers the actual lakefront activities.)

PART TWO

Before reading this praxis, please first visit PART ONE to get the background story.



What is it they say about the best laid plans? Right... awry.

At the main quest hub, we were positioned by the parking lot, beach, bike path, and bathroom/concession-stand crossroads. We had loads of human traffic, especially since we had two of the Foster Beach's wild parrot colony right behind us in a tree, which drew a lot of attention.



“Hail adventures! Heroes!”
“Will you help us save our village?”
“You look like a warrior of the ages!”

No matter our approach, no one would engage with us. Responses ranged from statements like “I have no money,” to lectures from a self-proclaimed biologist shaming us about asking people to kill ants, to generalized reproachful looks. We even had a dad/son combo give us a mocking look from the tops of their Segways as we called out to them asking what their magical steeds were. They were giving us mocking looks? Ha!!



Sometimes a person would just hang out close to us and chat, though they would refuse to do any tasks. A couple things we learned:
1. People are freaked out at the notion of killing an ant. Wha?!?
2. Everyone was VERY concerned about what “village” it was that we were trying to save.

But, finally, we roped in an individual willing to collect us some leaves, he even cut open his finger completing it, but when we asked him to accomplish two more tasks, he said his wife would kill him if he did more, so he had to go.



The relay quest hub was located about half a mile to the north along the path under a tree. There, we couldn't even get people to engage at all. The only person willing to speak with us was one of the ice cream vendors, who never did make it to the main quest hub.



About 45 minutes passed. It was obviously time for a rethinking...

The first thing we did was move the two quest hubs very close together. Since the main hub was around a lot of traffic, the relay people moved to about 60 feet from the main hub, with the parrots in between. Here is a picture from the smaller hub towards the larger hub, to show how close together we got.



We also decided that people could take any item from the loot they wanted after each quest they completed. There was a lot of stuff to give away, unfortunately we forgot to get a picture of the “treasure chest”.

We also changed the ant quest to just “locate an ant”, removing the killing part.

Doing these two things secured our first participant who completed ALL THREE QUESTS!! He did eventually find an ant and killed it without us asking him to and walked away with three pieces of loot. Our first hero.



The difficulty our first main hero had of finding even one ant, made us rethink the quest yet again. It then became “Find a piece of trash and throw it out in that rubbish bin over there!”

Then came the “rush”...

These guys completed the delivery and leaf collection quests, and walked away with loot.



This was followed by two adorable little girls, who collected leaves for us.



And then, well, then to make the whole experience worthwhile, we came across three people who did the letter delivery quest. They were so enthusiastic about what we were doing and asked tons of questions, (in which we did a pitch for sf0, or course) and their excitement and pleasure over finding us was contagous.



It had already been several hot hours in the sun for all of us, so the Monk gave the guy her shield as his loot. He was visiting from New Orleans and joked about having to explain the shield to the TSA when he took it home with him. I hope we eventually find them here on sf0, for they had that “spark” in their eyes. Thank you strangers!!



For all that though, the two parrots were the show stoppers. People were always assuming they belonged to us. HA! There was an evil moment or two where we considered charging people to take pictures of the birds, or at the minimum having to complete quests to do so, but the parrots are wild... they are their own entities and therefor above petty human manipulations.