SPOTLIGHT: Downtown Sanford goes Renaissance for Halloween with Enchanted Knights festival

Published October 15, 2026 at 11:23 PM EDT

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Orlando Rogue Knights, Central Florida's armored combat team, will be appearing in downtown Sanford at Enchanted Knights: Dungeons of Downtown Renaissance Festival on October 24.

A Renaissance festival will take over the streets of downtown Sanford on Saturday, October 24, just in time for Halloween. Costumes are enthusiastically encouraged. The event is called Enchanted Knights: Dungeons of Downtown and it’s free for all the lords and ladies of the realm.

Adam Brown is the co-owner of Wizards and Lizards Studios, Enchanted Knight’s parent company, and is the creative mind behind the event. The theme grew from a Dungeons and Dragons game into a full-scale series of interactive Renaissance festivals where people experience games and stories he has written, along with live jousting knights, local artisans, performers, a dunk tank using tomatoes instead of water, and more.

But Brown, a local himself, has an additional goal for his festivals: to build community, with or without the armor.

Brown says it’s an intentional choice not to charge admission.

An artisan makes a candle at Wizards and Lizards Studios, the parent company of Enchanted Knights. Locally handmade items will be on sale at the Enchanted Knights Renaissance Festival in downtown Sanford.

“It is very obvious to us that we lack places for the community to be anymore,” Brown said. “We've priced people out of everything. We have almost no third spaces left. We have no real community centers, and you can tell that people want somewhere to be. They want to be engaged with the people around them. They want to be a part of their community, and it's not something that you get every day anymore.”

So Enchanted Knights made the leap from tabletop role-playing game to the real world, but the event keeps some of the elements of its origin. For instance, there are experiences called “quests” available for attendees to play.

“For every festival, we write quests,” said Brown. “Sometimes it's more like a traditional scavenger hunt, where you get a clue and you figure out what that means and you go find the next one. Sometimes it's more video game style – you know where you're going, and you get there and you solve a puzzle, then you move on to the next one.”

Once the quests are finished, participants turn in their “quest journals” for prizes. There are bar quests, kids’ quests, a main quest, and side quests. No spoilers here.

Brown said it’s still kind of magic for him to see people engaging with his stories and puzzles. “It's amazing. As an artist, you spend a lot of time making things that people will never see. So, getting the chance to take all these things that I like to craft, taking all these stories and these puzzles and these other things that we've put together over the years, and giving them to people to do, and having them actually like it and come back to do it again the next time…it is amazing. I love it.”