Classic Dungeons and Dragons and Old School Gaming

D&D etc.


"Heir to a crumbling summit: to a sea of nettles: to an empire of rust: to rituals' footprints ankle-deep in stone."

-Mervyn Peake

"...and that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped."

-Sir Bedevere in Monty Python and the Holy Grail



Thursday, March 22, 2012

Dunsany & Elfland

...and now for something completely different!

I've been reading The King of Elfland's Daughter before I go to sleep.  a week or two ago, I drifted in and out of sleep as I was reading and as I did so the inspiration for this card game came into my mind.  This is a very short game that uses your basic playing cards.  It's kind of like a cross between Poker and Magic the Gathering.

It doesn't really have anything to do with Lord Dunsany, but I decided to call the game ELFLAND because of what I was reading at the time.

Here is a pdf of the rules for the game: ELFLAND

From the introduction (by Lin Carter) to The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany:

  "One of the four or five genuinely great exponents of the adult fantasy was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth baron of an ancient line which stretches back almost one thousand years to the Norman Conquest.
  Lord Dunsany was born in 1878 in Castle Dunsany, a 12th-century fortress which was his ancestral home, in County Meath, Ireland, among hills that were already rich in song and fable a thousand years before his Norman ancestors came a-conquering by the right hand of Duke William the Bastard.  These lands were the age-old demesne of the Ard-ri, the emperors of the ancient Celts. In Meath was Tara of the Kings, so sacred and venerable that the king who held it became High King of all Ireland.  Thus the hills and fields of Dunsany's childhood were steeped in golden legend, and some of the enchantment and music of antique Tara entered into his wonderful stories.
  Lord Dunsany was and astounding man.  A sensitive poet, an enthusiastic huntsman, and inveterate globetrotter, he was always off hunting lions on safari in Africa or teaching English literature in Athens (from which he escaped one jump ahead of the Nazis when they invaded).  Yet he found time to write over sixty books..."

Wow.

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