We knew we couldn't have people in the house in December 2020, but we wanted to keep the streak alive, so we went ahead with a London-family only party. We limited it to the basement, and to save myself time, I hung walls, but no ceiling sheets.
Each family member was given a $100 budget and free reign to design one room.
Lauren's room was Puppy Bowl. Our new pandemic puppy, Ozo, was direct beneficiary. Here he is shown with his friend Franklin "Frankie" Burke, the only non-London who was invited to Fortress Party.
Frankie's family waited outside while this was filmed. They were told we needed to borrow their dog for a few minutes, but they didn't find out why until this video was used as part of the Fortress Party 2021 invitation 11 months later.
Malcolm's Room was called The Adventurer's Tavern.
He wanted it to be the type of place that swarthy dungeon-crawlers would mingle between dragon slayings. And naturally, that meant there would be a map on a table that someone had stabbed through with a knife to indicate the location where many villagers had mysteriously disappeared.
Scarlett's Room: Stranger Things
We ended up reusing this idea in 2021, so I saved most of the pictures for a comparison montage in a subsequent posting. But here's a demogorgon materializing out a wall, as they are wont to do.
We ended up spending a fair amount of our respective budgets on costumes. Lauren and Scarlett were characters from Stranger Things (Robin and Elle, respectively), Malcolm was the barkeep, and I was the Puppy Bowl referee.
There were no other human guests, but we were able to give our cousins the Zoom Fortress Experience.
We kept several of the longstanding Fortress Party traditions alive, including the sign-in sheet and the stickers with (pandemic-themed) fortress puns.
Finally, no Fortress Party is complete without a lively rendition of "Cigareets and Whiskey."
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