Saturday, 5 August 2023

GrailQuest (The Den of Dragons)

A couple of weeks ago, I paid myself another trip down nostalgia lane and it only cost me £0.99. You may remember on this blog a few mentions about  J.H. Brennan, a writer of, among other things, gamebooks. I was quite fond of his work when I was a child. Well, I found on a charity shop the second bok of his GrailQuest series. I bought it on the spot. As the name indicates, it is freely inspired by the Arthurian legend, although the tone is mostly parodic. You play a young man transported magically by Merlin into the reign of Arthur through a spell, the book being a sort of "portal", as well as into the body of a young knight named Pip. It is pretty smart in a meta way. The medievalist specialised in the Arthurian legend will probably recoiled at the amount of silliness (you use a sword called Excalibur Junior, or EJ), but I do remember Brennan being capable of adding pretty dark touches here and there, as well as a few gory moments. I'm looking forward to revisiting the book in any case.

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