Voyage of Terror (1985 UK, 1987 US) has a great conceit. Like the others, it has Merlin summoning your consciousness to guide Pip in an adventure to once again save Camelot, this time by retrieving Arthur’s lost Excalibur. Except, that adventure is the next book. In this book, the spell goes wrong, stranding you on a boat full of Argonauts in ancient Greece. Despite my love of Arthurian legend, and warm feeling for the series as a whole, this un-Arthurian side quest is probably my favorite part.

The difficulty ramps up here. You don’t have EJ, your kick-ass talking sword, or any of the rest of your usual kit. Healing items aren’t plentiful, so you need to explore Dreamtime to get health. That was always an option in previous books (and a novel mechanic), but because you can die in dreams, it wasn’t really worth the risk. Here Dreamtime is a necessity of survival. The goal is to get back home, but the only way to do that is to find the Golden Fleece, and the only way to do that is to have lots of little island adventures along the way. Long John Silver shows up. There’s a mummy, too. There are some monsters from Greek myth, but not as many as you might expect, since you dealt with the Minotaur and Medusa back in England in previous volumes, a fact that still makes me chuckle.