As Leo may have said in Django Unchained – “Gentlemen, with Dungeons and Dragons, you had my curiosity. But now, with Call of Cthulu, you have my attention.”

Local troupe BS Productions return to FRINGE WORLD for a seventh season of shenanigans, and this year, they’re bringing the HP Lovecraft expansion pack. Fear and laughter being two sides of the same coin, let a million eldritch horror-comedies bloom.

Switching up from the self-contained one-shots the actors usually bring to stage, Cthulu is a full three-part campaign, progressing night to night during their run. Don’t worry coming in late though, as Scott McArdle, Keeper of the Lore, and his deep, bassy, perfect for narration voice, recaps both the game rules, as well as what happened in earlier instalments.

Out comes the big fluffy purple D20. A natural one is great, twenty is terrible, the rest up to dungeon-master discretion. Additionally, this being Lovecraft, we have a Board of Madness, albeit with theatre-sports as the options, rather than actual mental health afflictions.

Many of the best moments had their genesis on this Board. From banning the use of all words with an E – during an in-story Scrabble contest, no less – to only being allowed to reply reading sentences from one book (Lovecraft’s Cthulu itself) to the classic of “sit, stand, lean”, these were all fabulous.

The ad libs and plot beats also fantastic. Mister Faraday, the science teacher, stuck in a cage. A ghost smoking a cigarette – it’s 1920s America, but of course. The Cave of Exposition. Faraday, being cut out of his handcuffs, given an instant backstory as child violinist, needing all ten fingers to play.

That’s Chekhov’s tennis racquet as a fire-axe, if ever there was.

Splitting a longer storyline into three smaller parts indicates both risk and ambition on Improv DND’s part. It could have gone seriously awry. But there is an ease, a confidence about the performance that reassures that all is as it should be. Years grinding up through the lower levels has come to fruition, with this entire run already sold out.

They are very, very funny. Get your tickets in for next season, now.