The word talisman has several shades of meaning. It is an object, usually a piece of jewellery; it is magical, through being shaped like or decorated with a magical symbol, or through being imbued with magic some other way, and the magic traditionally offers the owner protection. Amulets and lucky charms can also be called talismans.
A gar-shaped talisman featured as a clue object on several occasions in Series 1-3, including the very first quest. Team 1 of Series 1 elected to take it, and found that it matched a motif in the Great Corridor of the Catacomb, but it was a red herring. The 'gar door' was the left-hand one, whereas Olgarth had told the team that justice lay on the right. What's more, taking the talisman meant that dungeoneer David was without a lamp to illuminate the darkened room in which he ended up. Thus, the talisman indirectly led to the first Knightmare death. Team 3 of Series 1 also picked up a talisman, but had a more successful quest than their predecessors.

Some teams found that the talisman was in fact a destructor, causing Life Force drain and pyschedelic (the ominous kind, not the hey-far-out-man kind) flashing when picked up. Team 3 of Series 2 was one (see above picture), Team 11 of Series 3 was another (to quote from Knightmare.com, 'the room and Treguard went mad for a few seconds'). Unusually, Team 9 of Series 2 was rewarded for handling a talisman, with the spell FREE. The level on which the talisman appeared as a clue item seemed to match the number of the series it was in (with the exception of the gar of invisibility found by Team 12 of Series 2 on Level 1), but maybe that was just coincidence.
In mythology, some talismans were so powerful that they prompted quests. And so it is that Quest 10 of Series 2 featured a talisman (also patterned after the rune gar) as the quest object. The team retrieved its fragments successfully, then completed the quest with an eponymous spell (see other TALISMAN definition).

[Earlier versions: 2011-07-05 17:55:12, 2006-05-09 22:03:10]

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Team 10 of Series 2 cast this spell to complete their quest. Even though they'd not been given the spell directly, nor had they acquired it by collecting letters (as Team 4 of Series 2 did with FREE), they somehow surmised that spellcasting TALISMAN was the only way to ensure victory.
Casting TALISMAN caused a talisman image to appear on the sphere in front of dungeoneer Julian, matching the talisman pieces he'd previously collected.[Previous version: 2005-09-11 17:21:11]

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