“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
-Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, “Good Omens”
Strolling The Fair: The Great Promenade
This is the most simple and most comprehensive of pleasures: beginning there and ending up here. Come, dress in your (finest? strangest? farthest away from normal? …everyday clothes? Whatever you want) and come meet the artisans, creators, tricksters, collectors, entertainers, gamesters, warriors, pickle-salespersons, small furry creatures from Alpha Centuri, witches, builders, con artists, peasants, fools, knaves, and others who make up our show!
Explore! Explore! While Humans and adjacent species are able to create extraordinary buildings and sculpted landscapes, sometimes the most enthralling thing about any area is the fascinating uniqueness and proud peculiarity of its excited and participatory denizens!
Some of the enjoyment is in participating, if you choose; you get more out of your experience the more you put into it. I, myself, am writing this in a cafe, listeing to Aliyah and wearing a t-shirt. It’s not a bad life. But I wouldn’t mind if I were hanging out at the Wonderhenge right about now, discussing graphic design with a couple of snarky Elves.
The Cast
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact…”
-Francis Bacon
Our thirteen(ish) stalwart cast members will amuse, amaze, and delight you! Actually, they’ll probably just walk around eating turkey legs and speaking in cool accents, but isn’t that enough?
Cast member auditions will begin in mid to late November.
The Oddities Exhibition
“Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness.”
– Jerry Saltz
Marvelously peculiar! Our famed free Halloween Festival attracts too many creators and curators of oddities for us not to invite them to come spend a lovely Faire-weekend with us! See and enjoy fascinating things! Bring your own as we recapitulate our famed Oddities Show & Tell!
Music & Performance
We’ve got live music every night and performers and shows throughout the weekend. You don’t want to miss our magicians! (Not the ones who do magic tricks, nor the Archmage who will turn you into three toads in a trench coat if you miss her performance.) And where there’s smoke performance, it’s rumored there’s fire…
Discussions, Panels, Meetups
What extraordinary Wonderplacers we have, what amazing makers and builders and artists!
Now, we don’t have quite so many panels as a convention, nor so few panels as the airless black hole slowly swallowing the 11th planet of our solar system. What we have, you should investigate! We’re excited for you to have the chance to meet and hang out with our authors, performers, creators, and other guests!
The Marketplace
“The diary containing Deak’s record of his trip to the Troll Market was discovered in 1893 by workers demolishing the building where it had been stored with a handful of other artifacts of unknown origin. Both diary and artifacts remained in the possession of a private collector until 1946, when they were purchased by the British government. They currently reside in the vaults of the British Museum.”
-Hellboy.wikia.com
We know. The Marketplace has its own section on this website. But we can’t help it. This IS a Market Faire-Day. Vendors from all of the Seven Hundred Nineteen Realms and Eleven Tiny Kingdoms will be present to amuse and delight you with their wares.
Dancing
DJ Ozno, The Original Time-Travelling DJ, will be making heads nod every night. Join him!
The Lore
There is no such thing as Vampires, Mondays, or Lore.