Downtime Activities - DnD Livegame is among the more than 90 events included in this year’s Dunedin Fringe Festival.
Actor and producer Rosella Hart said the ‘‘liveplay event’’ involved a group of five professional local actors playing a fully improvised and unscripted game of Dungeons & Dragons in front of an audience.
The tabletop role-playing game was a having a ‘‘massive resurgence in popularity’’ across the world, Ms Hart said.
It had become more mainstream over the past five years, partly because of the Covid-19 pandemic and the popularity of shows such as Netflix’s Stranger Things.
While there was a big Dungeons & Dragons community in Dunedin, the city lacked a theatre-based event where people could go and watch it, she said.
‘‘In New Zealand, there's a live game in just about every city except for Dunedin.’’
All of that culminated in Downtime Activities, which served as a ‘‘trial season’’ in preparation for an ongoing, episodic live game to be held monthly at the Gasworks Museum.
Ms Hart said they had received $15,000 of funding from the Dunedin City Council’s professional theatre fund, which covered seven months of shows, investment in sound equipment and infrastructure, along with community and cross-disciplinary partnerships.
All the monthly games would be recorded and converted into a podcastable format.
A live musician had also composed original music for all the sessions.
It was scheduled to start on the last Sunday of April.
The project would answer the question of just how popular Dungeons & Dragons in Dunedin really was, she said.
‘‘I want to try and get people to come out of the woodwork.
‘‘Mostly people play it at home and they play it just with their friends who play it, so it's really hard to know just how many people are actually meeting up regularly and doing this quite creative thing.’’
It was a good time to try something like this in Dunedin, even though it was ‘‘incredibly hard’’ to make regular theatre events happen in the city because of infrastructure challenges, Ms Hart said.
‘‘It doesn't need too much in the way of production because it's theatre of the mind.
‘‘It’s almost like a radio play, in that we describe the environments, we describe the things that are going on and we make them up on the spot.’’
The first two sessions of Downtime Activities had been full and Saturday’s coming session was all booked up too.
That included curious audience members who had until then known nothing about the game at all.
People could expect lots of silliness, unexpected twists and a satisfying story with a cast of larger-than-life characters, she said.
‘‘I just really love it, and I love playing.
‘‘It's an excuse to play more and meet people who do it.’’
The final session of Downtime Activities is on Saturday at 6pm, at the Dunedin Gasworks Museum.
