Welcome to the next adventure of Pip......or should I say Sir Pip! As seen at the end of the last book, Pip had finally slain the Black Knight of Avalon and closed the Gateway to the Ghastly Kingdom of the Dead, after which it was agreed that he was to be rewarded with a knighthood! After achieving all that, can there be any crisis that cannot be resolved by the mighty Sir Pip, Wizard-Basher cum Dragon-Slayer? Let's find out:
Gotcha!
Don't move. Not a muscle. I've been looking for you all over, up hill and down dale. I need you here, right now. Specifically, I need you in my Time. You wouldn't believe the mess they've gotten into and I need you to clear it up. So just you collect up your belongings. You'll want a couple of dice and pencil and paper and an eraser and that's about it. Travel light is my motto. Yours too since you'll be travelling through Time.
You know about time travel, don't you? Your body stays where it is, but I get the use of your head. What's inside it, anyway. Your mind. I'm going to call it all the way from your Time to my Time. I can do that because I'm a Welsh Druid. My name is Merlin, as you may remember if you've been to my Time before. I am Chief Adviser and General Dogsbody to His Majesty King Arthur, son of Uthur Pendragon and Liege Lord of Avalon. They call me the Wizard Merlin because of my magical powers.
But I can't sit here all day listening to you chattering. I have to take what's in your head and put it into the head of a young person in my Time called Pip. Pip the Wicked Wizard Basher, Pip the Dragonslayer, Pip the Ghastly Kingdom Gateway Closer to give that young person all the titles they've been bandying about lately.
Once you're in my Time you'll have to control Pip. You'll decide what Pip should do. And we'd better hurry because the Saxons are invading. Thousands of them. Great hairy men in great hairy ships. We need a hero to stand against them--single-handed if necessary. Which is where Pip comes in. Which is were you come in.
You're not afraid to fight thousands of warlike Saxons, are you? I didn't hear that.
You'd better collect your equipment quickly. I'm going to cast the spell now.
If you've never been to my Time before, turn to 1. If you know all about dice fights and LIFE POINTS and spells and so forth, you can go direct to 2. (Of course, you can always refresh your memory with the cut-out rules card that's included as a bookmark.)
There you have it, our next quest is to fight an entire army of Saxons! Can't be too hard, right?
I think we can skip Section 1, since the standard rules listed there are what we're already familiar with: LIFE POINTS, Combat, Sleep, Bribery, Firendly Reaction and Experience are exactly as how we handled them in previous books.
There's a note in the Exp section which says we can bring up to 40 Permanent LP with us to future books, which contradicts what's on the standard rules card, which says we can only bring up to 10. I'm going to go with what's in the actual text of Section 1, since the rule card section is more likely to be cut-and-paste from older books. And of course, the fact that our Pip actually has 12 Permanent LP from the previous book probably skewed my decision towards that. >.>
So, rolling the LIFE POOINTS:
1st roll = 5
2nd roll = 12
I think we can forego the third roll, since we got the best possible result. Pip's Starting LP is 12x4+12 = 60!! Let's hope we can hold on to that without dying (not going to be easy considering how our adventure is going to start!).
There're also notes on Healing in Section 1, but nothing really new. In this book, Pip doesn't start with any healing items, so the book gives us standard rules for when we find potions and salve, which is pretty much like previous books too: potions come in bottles of 6 doses, each restoring 2D6 LP. Salve comes in jars of 5 applications, each restoring a fixed 3 LP.
MERLIN'S MIGHTIEST MAGIC
Invasions were never very much fun (unless, of course, you happened to be the invading party.) Saxon invasions were the least fun of all. The great hairy men would pile out of their great hairy ships, waving their swords and stringing their bows and whooping all the way up to the beaches. Then, since nobody would have noticed their arrival, they would swarm across the peaceful fields of Avalon, looting, pillaging, burning down whole villages and making a general nuisance of themselves until King Arthur and his doughty Knights of the Table Round gathered up sufficient energy and armies to stop them.
Stopping Saxon invasions were never much fun either. The great, brutal Saxons were fierce fighters and had developed all sorts of nasty tricks with their broadswords which were painful, not to mention lethal, to their opponents. After several invasions, some of the less courageous Knights (Mordred, for example) began to advocate an accommodation with the Saxons.
An accommodation, as Mordred defined it, meant giving them huge chunks of prime English lands and hoping they would be well enough satisfied to leave everybody else's lands in peace. It was not such a silly idea as it sounded, and King Arthur was seriously considering it when the next Saxon invasion started. He sent a messenger to the leader, a great scruff named Entwhistla, outlining the broad proposal, but Entwhistla sent the messenger back minus his ears, which everybody agreed was definitely a refusal--and a very rude refusal at that.
Thus King Arthur and the Knights prepared, once again, to fight. In the King's case, this meant dusting off Excalibur.
A word about Excalibur may not go amiss here. The great sword was not, as many people though, the one which young Arthur had pulled out of a stone to lay claim to the throne of Avalon. That particular sword had been purchased by the Druid Wizard Merlin and accidentally imbedded when one of his spells went wrong. Apart form the fact that it helped make Arthur King, that particular sword was a very ordinary example of the blacksmith's art.
The sword Excalibur, by contrast, was a magical weapon, a blade forged with spells so powerful it could cut an elephant in half with a single blow. Since there were no elephants about in Avalon, even in those distant days, Arthur very sensibly used it against his enemies and the enemies of Avalon, so that he won virtually every battle he bothered to fight. More importantly, news of the sword's magical qualities soon spread, so that after a while, Arthur found he had less and less enemies, less and less battles. Excalibur was a peacekeeper.
Where the King got Excalibur was a bit of a mystery. Merlin claimed he had made it, but while he had undoubted talents as a wizard, those who knew him well realized such a weapon was far beyond his powers. (He had, admittedly, managed a sawn-off version of Excalibur for the mysterious young warrior Pip, but that had stretched his magical abilities to the limit.) Excalibur Junior, as Pip's sword was called, did +5 damage against his enemies. (The original Excalibur was a +10.)
Arthur seldom discussed the matter with anybody, but Queen Guinevere once let slip that it had been given her husband by the Lady of the Lake, a magical personage who was probably more fairy than human.
When it was not in use on the field of battle. Excalibur was kept in the Camelot Castle Treasure Room, along with other important artifacts like the orb and sceptre, the State Crown and the Legion Eagles (the latter captured by Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon, in the last days of the Roman occupation of Avalon). It was to the Treasure Room that Arthur went now, trailing a motley collection of ministers, advisers and pages. And it was in that room that Arthur discovered Excalibur had been swiped.
Now turn to 15.
As mentioned in Book 1 previously, it's here where the discrepancy in the background of Excalibur is corrected. Possibly due to purist reader complaints. >.>
The Court and Castle of Camelot was situated on a hill overlooking the tiny market town of Glastonbury. Like many similar towns in Avalon, Glastonbury had grown up around a market square. And like many similar squares, the market square of Glastonbury had grow up around a public well.
This well had a drystone wall surround and a thatched roof supported by stout oakwood uprights which also held in place the winch, rope and bucket people used to draw up the water.
At around 6 a.m. in summer (later in winter because of the dark mornings) the women of Glastonbury used to gather at the well to draw the day's supply of water and exchanged the day's supply of news. The men of the town remained in their comfortable chauvinistic beds, idly waiting for the women to return and make them breakfast. As a result, the Glastonbury women were the only ones who knew what was going on in the world, while the men had to rely on a heavily censored version of events passed on to them by their wives. No man ever went to the well in the mornings, partly because it was not the done thing, and partly because men them, as now, were terrified of large congregations of women.
But while no ordinary man ever went to the well in the mornings, one rather special man was frequently at, or near, the well at that time. That man was Merlin, the Druid wizard. The reason he was frequently at or near the well was that he lived in it, a fact not known to many and not known at all to the women of Glastonbury, who would never have talked so freely amongst themselves if they had realized the old fool might be listening.
Merlin, whose fearsome eccentricities sprang from his Welsh nationality rather than the fact he was a wizard, had several dwellings--a log castle in a forest, a crystal cave, an ancient, hollow, lightning-blasted oak tree amongst them. The well was a comparatively recent acquisition, prompted in part by a bubble-making spell he had created. The spell was one of those spectacular magical efforts which nonetheless appear totally useless at first glance. Merlin, however, was a man of great imagination and having discovered how to generate magical bubbles, he went quietly at midnight and generated one of immense proportions in the water at the bottom of the well. Then he tossed in a few sticks of furniture, several spell books, various items of equipment and an alchemical furnace. These passed through the walls of the magical bubble without affecting its structure and came to rest on the well bottom.
With a quick glance around to ensure he was not observed, Merlin then held his nose and jumped. He passed through the surface of the well water (now risen appreciably since the bubble was established) and emerged in the bubble itself. Once he had the alchemical furnace going, both he and his chattels soon dried out and he took up comfortable residence.
In less than a week, Merlin discovered his new home placed him at the centre of a most useful information network. Every morning at six he would be awakened by the sound of female voices, magnified by the effect of the water around his massive bubble and while at first he was silly enough to try to ignore them, he soon found to his amazement that the women of Glastonbury knew absolutely everything there was to know about anything (including, incidentally, those naughty goings-on between Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot which the Public Relations officers at Camelot had taken such pains to hush up).
It was in this way that Merlin learned of the Saxon invasion and decided, on his own initiative, to call up the famous hero Pip to deal with it.
Now turn to 30.
Although the spell required to get young Pip into heroic action was pretty complicated, Merlin anticipated no difficulties with it. He had, after all, managed the trick very successfully on three previous occasions and saw no reason why the fourth should give him any trouble now.
Pip's body was already in Avalon, of course, wandering about in its usual daze on a small but well-appointed farm run by Freeman John and Goodwife Miriam a few miles outside Glastonbury. Pip's mind was a different matter, of course. It was currently attached to a young person living in the distant future and required to be netted by a magical Time Warp in order to take control of the actions of Pip during an adventure.
Time Warps are extremely advanced magic, even for a Druid, and require considerable concentration if they are to function effectively. Unfortunately for Merlin, he was right in the middle of this difficult operation when a scatterbrained, young woman named Ludmille dropped a wooden bucket down the well.
On which ominous note it is now time to turn to 40.
Something wrong here. You're lying on a heap of filthy straw in a tiny little room with a single round window. And you're dressed funny. None of the highly polished armour that's de rigeur in Camelot; not even a decent Dragonskin jacket. Instead you have on a very light (and very greasy) linen tunic that doesn't even cover up your knobbly knees. You've no leggings either, or boots, come to that--only a pair of worn leather sandals.
You look around for old EJ, your magical sword that's never far from your side, but old EJ isn't there. What on earth has happened? Where's Merlin? Have the Saxons overrun Avalon before he could get you into Pip's body? Have you been cast into some smelly dungeon to rot?
Or are you simply crazy, imagining this whole thing? You may have a fever: it's certainly very hot in here, far hotter than you ever remember Camelot, even in summer. And the room seems to be going up and down, up and down, up and down, up and dow--Better stop thinking of the movement, it's making you feel quite sick.
There's a door in one wooden wall. Wooden wall? Who ever heard of a dungeon with wooden walls? Maybe you've fallen ill and gone mad on the farm of your adoptive parent; an attack of rabies, perhaps, so that they locked you away in an outhouse. But wherever you are and whatever your situation, you really should do something. The problem is--what?
Do you examine your mouth to see if it's foaming with the rabies? If so, turn to 50.
Do you try to look out through that funny little round window? Then turn to 60?
Do you search this grotty room thoroughly by moving on to 70?
Do you try the door by going on to 8?
And this is how Pip begins his new adventure: in unfamiliar territory with no EJ, no Dragonskin Jacket, no equipment from previous books, no Magic.....nothing but his LIFE POINTS to keep him alive! Meanwhile the Saxon Invasion is going on somewhere in Avalon. What can he do survive against such odds?
QUEST JOURNAL:
Permanent Life Points: 12
EQUIPMENT CARRIED:
MONEY:
EXPERIENCE POINTS:
ENEMIES DEFEATED:
PUZZLES SOLVES:
No. of Deaths:
None yet