The Extraordinary Adventures Of Baron Munchausen by James Wallis

Author:James Wallis [Wallis, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-63344-280-1
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Published: 2016-07-26T22:00:00+00:00

TO PLAY THE GAME

I PRESENT HERE two versions of my game, the first for younger children or older children who have fallen on their heads (or other peoples’ heads) or those whose imaginations have grown atrophied and sponge-ish like the brains of the giant crabs of old Nippon. The second version is for their older siblings, who will not burst into tears and run to hide in their nurse’s skirts at the hint of a challenge or an insult. But first, as this room is too hot and the chimney is smoking, I will pause for a refreshment.

Though you, my readers, will be unaware that seven months have passed since I penned those last words, I proffer my apologies all the same. In the midst of my repast, I was alerted by the shouts of my host’s servants to the approach of an enormous vortex or whirl-wind that stretched from the Earth to the skies like a great funnel and approached the house at alarming speed. Wasting not a moment, I demanded that the stoutest barrel in the place be brought before me, for I had formed a notion to explore this vortex, to determine its cause and where it led, and also to endeavour to save my host’s house, land, and family from destruction. The barrel was brought to the door of the hall, where I leaped into it and instructed the servants to roll it into the path of the vortex, which they duly did.

No sooner had the wind lifted the barrel and thrown it into the heart of the raging storm than I raised the wooden lid and peered out. In part, this was to give me a commanding view of the interior of the vortex, and in part because the barrel had previously been employed for the storage of strong cheese and therein had acquired an odour quite offensive to my nose, as well as a prodigious number of mice that had made it their home. I stared out and watched the land below me soon disappear from view as the Æolian currents whipped my transport higher and higher.

As I neared the top of the whirling wind, I saw shapes circling in the clouds above me. It was not, as I had first guessed, some mischievous god or nature-spirit of a neglected pantheon making trouble upon the Earth nor, as you may have conjectured from my previous adventures, one of the djinni of Persia strayed far from home. No, I tell you, as one of them broke from its circling and swooped down towards me, I saw it for what it was: a witch astride a broomstick, her face twisted by evil into a monstrous visage.

In a flash, I understood their devilry: through an incantation and circling motion of their brooms, they had conjured and sustained the vortex and were guiding its path across the landscape to bring destruction upon their enemies and those of their infernal lord—for my host was not only a noted officer

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