honestly monty python and the holy grail is just a dnd session w/ really uncooperative players and a dm who worked really hard on a campaign but gave up halfway through
FINE the POLICE arrive and ARREST EVERYBODY go home.
no, for real, these are actual things that happened during filming:
-it was produced with a budget of around $400,000, so they had to make a lot of cutbacks. like, a lot. it even effected the staging of scenes. (watch lancelot’s helmet!)
-neil innes, who wrote the songs the characters sang in the movie, was originally supposed to compose a score for the film, but the budget meant that he couldn’t get the “epic” sound that he wanted. most of the score wound up being taken from a stock music catalog.
-the job of directing fell onto both terry gilliam and terry jones, who both had different ideas for the film. also neither of them had directed a feature film before, AND they were both acting in the film. (gilliam directed the cartoon sequences for the group)
-on the first day of filming the camera they had rented completely fell apart and they had to get a new one.
-it was filmed in rural scotland in the middle of fall, so it was damp and rainy most of the time.
-the hotel they were staying at was so cheap that they only had hot water for a few hours a day, so when shooting days ended they all made a mad dash back to their rooms just for a hot shower.
-graham chapman, who played king arthur, was battling with chronic alcoholism and was suffering the brunt of the symptoms. it got so bad the rest of the group told him “if you don’t fix your problems by next year we’ll kick you out”. thankfully he did, and recovered just in time for their next movie, life of brian.
-major revisions to the script would be made on the fly. patsy, the little guy who follows king arthur around, was originally supposed to have beens sir gawain, who would constantly break the fourth wall and tell the audience how the crew created the special effects. there was an entire sequence planned where the knights would meet a guy named “king brian the wild”, who would let people into his castle and force them to sing in close harmony before killing them. the running gag with the coconuts was a last minute decision, the thought process behind it being “well we can’t afford real horses and the movie is already pretty silly so why not show how we made the horse sounds?”
-tim the enchanter had a much more “magical” name in the script, but john cleese forgot it and just made up a name.
-originally the movie was supposed to end with a climactic battle sequence between arthur’s troops and the frenchmen at castle aaaargh. at first the frenchmen seem to have the upper hand, and almost decimate arthur’s troops…until a gang of swallows fly by and drop coconuts on their heads, finishing the joke set up at the beginning of the film. sadly the grail wasn’t in the castle and the knights go home dejected…only to wind up in modern london, where they buy the grail at harrod’s department store. but the budget wasn’t enough to get real swallows or make convincing fake swallows, and at that point they were sick of working on the film, so they said “fuck it the cops arrest everyone”.
so “a dnd session gone wrong” perfectly sums up both the movie and the process of making the movie.
Tonight is going to be a major struggle…
I feel like absolute crap, but I still have to try work through it
You can use the crescent moon as a
compass. Imagine a line that extends
from the top point of the crescent
through its bottom point and down to
the horizon. If you are in the northern
hemisphere, you’re looking south, and
if you’re in the southern hemisphere,
the crescent points you north. Though
not exact, it works as a rough guide –
and the higher the moon is, the more
dependable the method is. SourceSource 2Source 3
So we were going through the underdark on a quest for some kind of artifact. Since we didn’t have a dedicated healer, our sorcerer specialized in crowd control and came up with very creative ways to use his spells.
We had been driven to the middle of a bridge and it was being cut from both sides. We had lost a lot of health and the spellcasters were low. The chasm was very deep, and none of us liked the chances with falling. Looking like a party wipe and the DM didn’t appear to like it either. We had accepted our fate.
Our characters all shook hands and did the “It was a pleasure serving with you.” Thing.
The rope was cut.
Fighter: “*Sorcerer, don’t you have any featherfall spells?”
Sorcerer: “No first levels left… WAIT! I have an idea!”
Sorcerer OOC: Can I cast a spell while falling?
DM: What level?
Sorcerer OOC: “4.”
DM: Beat a 14 concentration check
Sorcerer succeeds and shouts: “I cast Evard’s Black Tentacles!”
We all just look at him. He’d just recently leveled up so he hadn’t used this spell yet. DM pulled open the book to see how the spell worked.
DM: Ok…Oh-OH! Yeah. That’ll do it. So you see the sorcerer point to the ground that is rapidly approaching and you see rubbery tentacles spring straight up. As you fall, each grabs tight to you and begins squeezing really hard, but never lets you hit the ground. You are all being grappled.“
Rogue: “Did you just save our lives by improvising a HENTAI CRASH PAD?!”
Sorcerer: “I’d never thought I would live to hear that combination of words!”
Through our rogue pulling off good escape artist checks and getting everyone out, we all survive the fall only slightly worse for wear.
The Setup for my Home D&D game, table was built on New Year’s Eve 2016, with two of my players and myself, the TV is a 40" Samsung smart tv connected to a dell precision 5720 27" 4K workstation running Fantasy Grounds to manage campaign details, display maps and use tokens onscreen to represent characters.
Total cost not including the tv or workstation was about $120.
Target had these awesome $3 candy dishes in their Halloween section and I looked at them and immediately thought, “I could put moss in that,” and I bought one of each.
