Sumer is icumen in

"It was an age that enjoyed transvestism and [...] bisexuality. A great deal of Spenser's Faerie Queene concerns the exploits of the Amazonian knights Britomart and Belphoebe. Britomart, like Viola, has to woo a lady in order, we are told, to keep up her disguise. She seems to have been very convincing."

-- Maureen Duffy, The Erotic World of Faery

To mark the summer solstice we have some wild and riotous fantasy in store. Brawny knights dressed fetchingly in dainty frocks. Fair maidens clad in plate armour and knocking down opponents like ninepins at the joust. Courtly gatherings where honeyed words are more dangerous than poison. Tourneys that are tests of virtue as much as of mettle.

Come back tomorrow for all the cross-dressing, gender-bending, sword-clashing, monster-hunting, pseudo-medieval action you could ask for, as filtered through the triple lenses of Thomas Malory, Greg Stafford and, most of all, Edmund Spenser. Yes, it's The Faerie Queene as it might have been reimagined in an OSR module of the 1980s. Farewell for now, friends, I'll be gone; our queen and all her elves come here anon.

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

What is it about magic and colour? At a role-playing convention years ago, Greg Stafford described to the breathless Glorantha groupies a scene in a RuneQuest movie that was pitched to the deaf ears of Hollywood. Something has happened to remove magic from the world, said Stafford, and the movie would show this by switching from colour to black-&-white.

It made me think first of A Matter of Life and Death (the difference between monochrome and colour is used more interestingly there) but the very next neuron to fire recalled SPI's 1975 boardgame Sorcerer, in which wizards attuned to different colour frequencies vied for power by enticing each other to battle in zones whose hue favoured their own magic. Sorcerer created quite a stir among us boardgamers because it was SPI's first foray into fantasy gaming - which, as they usually catered for the hardcore wargamer, was a crisis of confidence brought on, no doubt, by the growing success of grungy dungeon games. If you're interested, you can get a glimpse of the rulebook here.

A few years after that, in 1986, Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson came out with the Duel Master series - for me, their best gamebooks, and probably my favourite gamebooks ever. The first (and best) of these, Challenge of the Magi, involved two duelling sorcerers of the Rainbow Land (part of which unaccountably overlapped with Warwickshire and/or the poems of Thomas Lodge) whose magic obeyed a chromatic taxonomy:

• Red for fire
• Black for death
• Blue for illusion
• Green for nature
• White for... um, "holy" stuff

There were two books. Each player took one and you chased each other around the map of the Rainbow Land, trying to fake out your opponent so he didn't guess the colours on which you were strongest. OK, in the era of videogames that probably doesn't sound too impressive, but we had to make our own fun* in those days. And anyway, books are like radio: the pictures are better.

To this day I never figured out how Mark and Jamie made those books work. There was some kind of crazed obsessive-compulsive genius at work in the amazingly detailed rules (which were, nonetheless, easy to use) and the complex intricacies of the flowchart (likewise). And they were meaty, these tomes: 800 sections each. And you got a solo option.

They should have been a massive success, but the tragedy of gamebooks was that the craze didn't last long enough to really support any of the interesting things they were evolving into. That's why it surprises me when some modern revivals of the medium seem to aspire only to setting the clock back to simple dungeon-bashing. By the late-'80s gamebooks were already way beyond that.

(For the sake of balance I should add that there are plenty of modern gamebooks that have continued to innovate in terms of rules, setting and, most interestingly, the depth and quality of the storytelling - just look at the quality of most Windhammer Prize entries, for example.)

Fabled Lands LLP has the rights to the Duel Master books and they are cherry-ripe for conversion to apps. A little bit of handheld tech is perhaps all they needed to get the success they deserved. Twenty-seven years on, we'll see what we can do.


* Although, as Mamet says, everybody makes their own fun; if you don't make it yourself it isn't fun, it's entertainment.