Hmmm. Leslie Fish wrote a song, Serious Steel, where not Rennies, but Scadians are fighting their way home in a post- apocalyptic world relying on their skills in a world gone non-tech. I love the last stanza:
We have the skill to save our folk from whatever evil thrives, …and…
Admit the truth–this is the chance we’ve hoped for all our lives!
You can hear it on her CD of the same name. I could see this fleshed out into a movie.
If you’re serious, I’d join. I love those books. I’m counting down the days until the new trilogy comes out.
Thanks for the recommendation, but I can’t do e-books. I get headaches like whoa from too much internet reading. And it makes reading in the bathtub slightly more problematic. 
The paperback is only about $8, which is pretty fair for a new book.
I’d totally be up for a post-apocalyptic/Ren-Faire book club. There’s certainly enough books out there for it.
I’d be up for the book club idea!
And I didn’t realize A Meeting at Corvallis is out, so I called Barnes and Noble and ordered it. If someone else has read it can you let me know just one little thing, that was left hanging at the end of The Protector’s War Did Rudy survive his injury? A simple yes or no would do.
Damn you. I thought NO ONE would think of this besides me.
Yes.
How about “Sweey Silver Blues” by Glen Cook. First we have to invent a time machine to hire Harrison Ford c. 1985. I would love to see the battle they had versus the vampires, unicorns, centaurs, dark elves, trolls and grolls. And we also get mammoths and T-rexes later. And the beautiful red heads dressed ever so maindenly. Ok, the hero wears a trenchcoat but his only real weapon is his bat with a lump of lead at the end.
Of all the fantasy books I’ve read this series is the one I most want to see done.
Thank you** silenus**.
Yep, possibly. I was the sweaty guy huffing scent beads.
No Great Magic is one of Fritz Leiber’s Change War stories. (The first one I read–in an early 60’s Galaxy magazine.) In it, a team of time agents uses a theater to travel through time & space and effect “changes.” (Or reverse them.) You see, theaters seem to “spring up” out of nothing, from time to time. Everyone expects theater folk to be a bit odd. The theater provides “cover” for the Spiders to fight their endless war against the Snakes.
How do we know that everyone at the RenFest is really just dressing for the occasion? What if an ancient guild of wizards found a way to the future? Or future folk find the RenFest a convenient base for changing our own world? What if some of those anachronisms are inadvertant–not “creative”?
After dark, visitors leave & festive gatherings begin. What if some RenFolk stumble into a “party” that is odder than usual? And discover an eldritch plot that must be foiled by a motley crew of musicians, crafts folk & bawdy wenches?
Portals through time & space are optional. A sense of humor is not.
I have to ask the Ren Faire participants on this board – how would you be able to tell?
Isn’t A Knight’s Tale close enough for you?
The wenches certainly can’t get any hotter.
Screenplay’s not going to get any funnier.
You’re not going to get better actors. . .Paul Bettany, Heath Ledger, and Wash from Firefly.
Well…
…
…hmm. I think it would take someone getting actively stabbed and gutted. That’s unusual for a Faire party.
(I can hear the distant voice of ‘You think that’s unusual? No shit, there I was…’)
…at Tortuga! Ahh! Tortuga! There I was!..
Some of our friends can carry on for a good five or ten minutes going on and on and saying nothing at all about Tortuga.
But yes, other than intentional injuries like that, I know what “usual” means and I know what “odder” means, but the two together don’t make sense. All of our parties are odd.
Ah, yes, that reminds me of some of the more ridiculous conversations I’ve had in the SCA regarding The End of the World as We Know It (Google TEOTWAWKI some time for some very strange reading).
“Deathstalkers and the Warriors from Hell” the basis for a hugely successful franchise? I dunno about that one. I saw the original “Deathstalker,” and it’s supposedly much better than any of its sequels. (I’ve seen “Warriors from Hell” too, both the original and the MST#K version, but I can’t remember a thing about either. Probably a matter of the brain repressing traumatic experiences.)
Not even the original Deathstalker is something that could imaginably serve as the basis for a successful franchise. I’ll grant you it had the whole boobies thing down thanks to Lana Clarkson and Barbie Benton and “Orgy Slavegirls Nos. 2-15,” but Deathstalker was much more of a sword and sandal romp than a medieval romp, and ren faires strike me more as medieval thing than a sword and sandal thing. You know, “Ivanhoe” or King Arthur" kinda stuff. “Quest of the Delta Knights” fits right in here. (And the MST3K version is often honored in the Evil Captor household when the sight of an actress sporting major cleavage is greeted with “She’s got a butt on her chest!”)
Granted, many moviemakers mix sword and sandal elements with medieval elements without so much as a fare-thee-well, but what the OP is suggesting is that adapting the special flavor of ren faires to movie form would make for a highly successful franchise.
I don’t know if it’s true – it could be that those who are attracted to ren faires are the major audience for ren faire stuff and nobody else would go see a ren faire movie. I tend to doubt this because medieval movies have been very successful in the past.
The only person I know of who has ever had any real success with the wench/boobage/actual-movie-that’s-not-just-softcore-porn thing has been Sam Raimi with his series of big-boobie action movies.
I don’t think the OP’s dream is likely to be fulfilled.
Well perhaps I slightly overstated the wench angle in my earlier argument. But I had just returned from the RenFest, so you can understand my enthusiasm. Plus, let’s face it: (good movie) + (wenches) = (good movie + wenches). That’s not my own argument, that’s pure mathematics.
We know there was a audience for high fantasy such as Lord of the Rings. We know there’s an audience for swashbuckling period adventure like Pirates of the Caribbean. I suggest that these two film styles are not immiscible. In other words, it should be theoretically possible to craft films that combine the distinct appeal of both franchises, with a total result that is greater than the sum of either alone. I further submit that the RenFaire provides empirical evidence for this hypothesis, as its flavor successfully incorporates elements of both.
Bear in mind also that this realization was not arrived at while under the influence of common scent beads. These scent beads were made out of pure sea salt. And while salt may enhance, it does not lie.
Fold in some SF and some aliens and we have a winner. Somebody call Poul Anderson’s agent and get the rights to The High Crusade. 
Actually, I think the wenchage/boobage thing is important. It would give a RenFaire movie it’s distinctive “look” as it were. Hell, you could probAbly keep your PG rating and still have LOADS of wenchage/boobage just by having lots of womanly eye candy wandering around in those down-to-there corsets they wear, or those tits-on-a-shelf things that magically don’t reveal nippleage somehow. Get someone like Glori Anne Gilbert or Mary Carey and it won’t really matter that their nipples don’t show.
Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks has a bit more fantasy in it than I think most of you are looking for, but has the definite Renaissance Festival vibe.
