Barons and wizards

Arthur: ‘Which is the greatest quality of knighthood? Courage? Compassion? Loyalty? Humility? What do you say, Merlin?’

Merlin: ‘Hmm? Well, they blend, like the metals we mix to make a good sword.’

Arthur: ‘No poetry. Just a straight answer. Which is it?’

Merlin: ‘All right, then. Truth. That's it. It must be truth above all. When a man lies, he murders some part of the world. You should know that.’

Court magician – on parchment it looks like such a cushy job. You get the protection of a great lord. Access to his network of connections. Resources for keeping your laboratory well stocked. Money and space to build up a decent library.

It’s never that easy, of course. Even if your patron is the most sober-minded of barons, he’s going to be calling on your services at any hour of the day and night. What is a court sorcerer for, after all? There are always rivals to be spied on, messages to be sent, opposing armies to be scattered by foul weather, paramours to be seduced with love philtres, stars to be read, ailments to treat, enemies to be stricken with plague. Even Merlin is made to conjure great magic for no better reason than that his lord wants to sleep with another man’s wife.

The court wizard is not only there to cast spells. He's also read a lot of books and is supposed to be wise and well-versed in devious stratagems, making him the lord's valued consigliere. 

There can be far more frivolous demands that that on a wizard’s time. A lord needs something to fill the long winter evenings when it’s too cold and wet to go jousting other knights or stirring up petty wars. Hence King Arthur’s whimsical question about the qualities of knighthood mentioned above, or his bored yearning for strange experiences that brings the Green Knight into Camelot:

‘And also another matter moved him so,

that he had nobly named he would never eat

on such dear days, before he had been advised,

of some adventurous thing, an unknown tale, 

of some mighty marvel, that he might believe,

of ancestors, arms, or other adventures.’

Feasts, holidays, and celebrations are times for a lord to show off his wealth. Minstrels, acrobats, jugglers, jesters, wrestlers – anyone can provide such commonplace entertainment, so to outdo his rivals a lord will need to strive for something more exotic. Dwarves jousting on the back of pigs, cavorting bears, or slaves from Outremer performing the dance of Salome all count as cracking entertainment to the medieval gentry, but the crème de la crème is to bring out a court sorcerer for that frisson of the mysterious, macabre and faintly forbidden.

You might think it’s beneath the dignity of wizards like Merlin or Cynewulf to sing for their supper like this, but after all it’s not so different from after-dinner entertainment in the modern world. If you can get Henry Kissinger to turn up and regale your dinner guests with a few Nixon anecdotes and some takeaway wisdom, the real pleasure is in letting them know you can call on a man who has had the fate of the world in his hands. On a less exalted level, think of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull teaming up to mount a Wild West show in front of European royalty and even the Pope. Near-mythic figures have never been averse to cashing in on their reputations.

What would a court magician do to entertain his or her lord’s guests? We have plenty of examples from medieval literature. D B Easter in A Study of the Magic Elements in the Romans d'Aventure and the Romans Bretons cites turning stones into cheese, causing oxen to fly, having asses play musical instruments, bringing folded paper birds to life, giving inanimate objects the power of speech, transforming animals into knights, animating a suit of armour, increasing the size of a room, making water flow uphill, telling fortunes, prophesying the future, and calling up a band of phantom warriors to fight each other.

This post originally appeared on my Patreon page accompanied by a detailed adventure seed or a mini-scenario (take your pick). I'm afraid if you want the scenario too you're going to have to subscribe, sorry about that.

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.