Happy solstice

There's nothing Yule-flavoured about this except that it's magical (or do I mean madrigal?) and riotously delightful and those are essential elements of the season. Jonas Wolf's Renaissance covers are my current favourite thing on YouTube, so I wanted to share the fun with you.

For the best in gaming pleasure, I can't think of a better way to celebrate the tilt of the year than by getting the latest issue of Casket of Fays, which comes with a periplus of the Emphidian coast (map below) as a bonus. There are the usual top-quality scenarios, solo adventures, articles and artwork that are the hallmark of Red Ruin Publishing. I feel privileged and humbled to have such talented folks as these contributing to the world that Oliver and I created forty years ago.

If you're in the north, stay warm, and the sun will resume normal service as soon as possible.

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.

Sayings of the High One

Well, it's that time of year again. The season when the Wild Hunt rides the sky and the sun flickers down to an ember, perhaps never to rekindle.

I like Yuletide, but the magic for me lies not in the Bethlehem child and his royal gifts but in rather darker and fiercer deities. Like Alan Moore, I believe all these things are real - in the same way that love and hate are real, not in the way that log fires and mince pies are. But some are more real to me than others. Odin and the other Aesir, above all the other gods mankind has imagined. They feel like old friends.

Whatever your beliefs, or lack of same, may you rise to find the sun still in its heaven and with a year of wondrous experiences laid out ahead. I'll leave you with the Allfather on Yggdrasil:

"I know that I hung on the wind-swept tree,
Nine long days and nights;
Stabbed with the spear, sacrificed I was
To Odin, myself to myself,
High on the tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs.

"None gave me succour with food or drink,
As I gazed right down in the deep;
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them,
And forthwith back I fell."

Thus Odin spoke before the world began;
Then he rose and came again.

Illustration by Paul Reck (Odingraphics) on DeviantArt, reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.