Welcome to the playthrough of Book 3 of the Grailquest series! If you've played or following the last game, then you'll have a good idea of what this book is about. The plot continues from Book 2 as, having slain the Brass Dragon that entered this world through the Gateway to the Ghastly Kingdom of the Dead, it now remains for Pip to close the Gateway itself!
Let's begin, as usual, with the opening address from Merlin:
Sit still and pay attention. Otherwise this book may kill you. Probably several times.
It's a magic book.
This book is one long spell. One long exercise in sorcery. One long operation of wizardry. One mighty memorandum of magic.
My magic.
My name is Merlin.
I'm also dead, but don't let that disturb you. I'm not a ghost. I'm just talking to you from another Time. I was (am) perfectly alive in that other Time. Perfectly fit and healthy for a man of my age. Which is quite old. In my Time they call me Merling the Druid. Or the Wizard Merlin. Or Merlin the Magician.
I am casting a spell.
Specifically, I am casting a spell over you.
Don't panic. It's a nice spell. It will help you visit my Time. You're quite famous in my Time. In my Time you were (are) called Pip and you're a bit of a hero. They call you Pip the Wizard Basher. And Pip the Dragonslayer.
In my Time you live quite near to Camelot. Which is near Glastonbury and where King Arthur has his Court. You remember King Arthur? You know him quite well in my Time. Quite intimately. And he knows you, which is more to the point. I shouldn't be surprised if he asks you to join the Round Table soon.
Especially is you manage to close the Gateway to the Ghastly Kingdom of the Dead.
But before you can do that, you have to come back to my Time.
And before you can do that, you'll need dice. Ordinary dice. Six sides and spots. Two of them. (Or one if you can't find two.) And paper. And pencil. And a rubber. (They called them rubbers in my Time. In your Time they call them erasers.)
Go get your equipment together and turn the page.
Now let's explain what's going on. When the spell works--if it works--your mind will come back to my Time. When it reaches my Time it will occupy another body, the body of a young person, a young hero, called Pip.
When you're in Pip's body, you won't be able to carry on the way you do now. Not exactly. You'll be able to get into trouble all right and have adventures and find gold and get yourself killed all right, but only if you go about it the right way. Which is the way I'm going to explain.
(If you forget any of my explanations, don't worry. They're all down on the card at the back of the book. All my spell books have that sort of card. Saves a lot of trouble.)
But before I can do that, I need you in my Time...
Yes, as stated, there are rule cards at the back of every book. I neglected to post them for the last book, since they were almost identical with the first book except for 2 things: the addition of spells, and the fact that Bribery was for some reason not available as an option to avoid battles.
In this book there are more changes. More spells will be added, Bribery makes a return. There's also a new stat and new rules regarding equipment that are for some reason not listed in the rule card for this book. :/
Anyway, all those will be gone through in detail later in the text, but here's the card:
THE MONDAY MEETING OF THE TABLE ROUND
Monday meetings of the Table Round were not usually up to very much. It was the weekend that did it. Unless there was a war on or a bad season for dragons, most Knights took the weekend off. All but the most urgent Quests were quietly postponed. Notes were sent off to distressed maidens advising them to hang in there just a little longer. Wrongs that could not be righted by the Friday night were scheduled for attention as early as possible in the coming week. The weekend itself was devoted to Pleasure.
At least that's what the Knights called it. Normal human beings might have called it something else, but normal human beings had very little say in the affairs of the Realm in the days of King Arthur. It was the King who ran the show; and under him the Knights. What the Knights did at weekends was hunt and joust and wassail and carouse.
Of these various Pleasures, wassailing and carousing were by far the most lethal. In a joust or a hunt, you usually went fully armoured, which protected you pretty well against boars' tusks or opposition lances. But on Saturday night when you went off wassailing and carousing, it was considered very bad form to wear full armour--or any armour at all. So you put on your best linen tunic and fresh leggings and a new pair of boots and rode off lickety-spit for the nearest tavern where you wassailed and caroused until the landlord's daughter threw you out.
(The landlord himself could not throw you out, of course, since as a Knight you were Gentry and as a landlord, he was only Trade. But in the Age of Chivalry, no Knight would dream of refusing a request from a gentle maiden, so landlords would wink at their daughters who would take you by the ear and out you would be, in the pouring rain.)
As you can readily appreciate, anyone who spends a weekend wassailing and carousing can't expect to be in peak condition come Monday morning. Which explains why the Monday morning meetings of the Table Round were always such a mess.
They never started on time for one thing. King Arthur would enter the huge meeting hall promptly as ten to find the only person in attendance was the Senior Polisher, whose duty it was to maintain the high sheen of the table top.
For want of anything better to do, the King would examine the newly-polished surface of his Table Round. It really was a beautiful example of the craftman's art. The main body of the Table was oak, of course, but teak inlays marked it precisely into twelve segments, each marked with a Zodiac Sign--Aries, Taurus, Gemini and so on all the way round to Aquarius. The original idea--thought up by that old fool Merlin, of course--was that Arthur would choose twelve trusty Knights, each with a different Birth Sign, thus ensuring strict astrological balance. But it had never worked out in practice.
Before Arthur established chivalry, Camelot had been a rather wild place. Half the Knights in the realm hardly knew where they had been born, let alone when, so that the astrological calculation of their Sun Signs proved totally impossible even to a skilled practitioner like Merlin, and the Table Round had become so popular it was evident that the membership would never stop at twelve. Nor did it. Now whenever there was a large attendance (seldom on a Monday morning) the Knights just sat anywhere they pleased, all squished up together to fit round the Table's rim.
But on this particular Monday morning, things were different. It was still a full five minutes before the Roman waterclock would dribble out the hour of ten, yet the Chamber of the Table Round was already packed to capacity. The King was there, of course, so too were all the important Knights--Lancelot, Galahad, Bedevere, Mordred, even Pellinore who had never been known to attend a Monday meeting of the Table, let alone arrive early for one.
The reason for this strange development was that there was a crisis on.
While King and Knights of Avalon met in the turret chamber of the Table Round, another meeting of a very different sort was going on in a very different setting.
About five miles as the crow flies from the Court at Camelot, a huge oak tree had grown for centuries beside a crossroads. Because they are easy to find, crossroads are often used as meeting places for lovers, or farmers, or gossipers and a few even become unofficial fairgrounds as wandering peddlers found them a convenient place to sell their wares. Minstrels tended to congregate at crossroads and sing ballads about deeds of valour. But nobody ever gathered at the Crossroads of the Oak. It had a very nasty reputation.
The Oak itself had been blasted by lightning sometime in the dim and distant past, with the result that it no longer leafed and presented a monstrous silhouette against the skyline, particularly at night. Then there was the fact that the crossroads had been used as the site of a gibbet until King Arthur outlawed public hangings and was consequently believed to be haunted by the spirits of several generations of criminals who had been hanged, drawn and quartered there. Then there was the swamp, which produced marsh gas, which in turn sometimes ignited, particularly in summer, to produce those eerie floating lights rural people call Will O' The Wisps. And then there were the coloured flashes often seen to emanate from the blasted oak itself--flashes for which there was no natural explanation whatsoever, not even marsh gas. So people kept away, for fear of losing their lives or their souls.
At least most people kept away. On this misty, eerie, chilly Monday morning, there was one idiot who kept wandering in circles calling loudly, 'Hello... Hello... Hello....'
The idiot's name was Pip.
How do we deal with the snake?'Hello...' you call. 'Hello... Hello... Is anybody there?'
You are only vaguely aware of how you got to this ghastly, mist-enshrouded place and not at all aware of what you are supposed to do now you're here. Merlin said he would meet you here. Or somewhere here. But there's not a soul in sight and absolutely nothing of interest to explore: no landmarks at all except the desolate crossroads itself and the remains of an absolutely gigantic ancient oak tree no longer in the land of living vegetables.
'Hello... Hello... Is anybody there? Is anybody here?'
A small milestone cut with Roman numerals tells you how far you are from Camelot. (Too far!) Since the information isn't much use to you, you sit on the stone and wait. The mist is very chill: it soaks into your leggings and creeps past the ties of your jerkin to absorb the heat of your body despite the woollens your adoptive mother, the Goodwife Miriam (or Mary, as she prefers) insisted you wore for this little outing.
'Hello,' you call, beginning to wonder if you are in the right place at all. For want of anything better to do, you kick a stone near your foot. Underneath it, to your horror, is a snake.
You're in trouble already and the adventure hasn't even started! No equipment, no magic, no weapons except old EJ--Excalibur Junior--your trusty sword from earlier adventures and you've left him toasting his pommel by the fire in your farmhouse home near Camelot. Will you try to reason with the snake? (Go to 8). Run like blazes? (Go to 20). Strangle it with your bare hands? (Go to 30). As always, the choice is yours--after all, it was you who got yourself into this mess.