Lone Wolf

Overview

Lone Wolf is a series of gamebooks written by Joe Dever, beginning with Flight from the Dark in 1984. Like other gamebooks, each volume is a paperback divided into numbered sections that the reader jumps between according to their choices, with a little game system bolted on to settle fights and track wounds. What set Lone Wolf apart was continuity. The reader plays one hero across the whole series — a young warrior-monk of the Kai order who takes the name Lone Wolf — and the skills, weapons and special items won in one book carry forward into the next. It was, in effect, a roleplaying campaign bound into paperbacks.

The setting is Magnamund, a world of the planet Aon. The northern kingdom of Sommerlund is guarded by the Kai Lords, and menaced by the Darklords of the Darklands to the west. In the first book the Darklords' armies destroy the Kai monastery during a festival, and the only survivor is the novice who will become Lone Wolf.

Origins

Dever was a keen roleplayer. He began building Magnamund in 1975 as the world for his own Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, and in 1982 he became the first British winner of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Championship in America. Before games he had worked in music, as a session musician at Pye Records and a recording engineer at the Manor Studios in Oxfordshire. Lone Wolf was first conceived as a roleplaying game system for Games Workshop — the company whose founders had just launched Fighting Fantasy through Puffin — but Dever instead took it to Beaver Books, part of the Hutchinson group, as a gamebook series.

With the illustrator Gary Chalk, he developed the books for Hutchinson's imprints. Flight from the Dark and its sequel Fire on the Water were launched together in July 1984, and they reportedly sold more than 100,000 copies in the first week. Chalk illustrated the first eight books; in the United States the series appeared under Berkley's Pacer imprint.

How it plays

A reader needs only a pencil and the Action Chart printed at the front of the book. There are no dice. Instead, the book includes a Random Number Table — a grid of the digits 0 to 9 — and the reader closes their eyes and stabs it with a pencil point. Lone Wolf's COMBAT SKILL is 10 plus a random number; his ENDURANCE, which works like hit points, is 20 plus another.

The reader then chooses five of the ten Kai Disciplines: Camouflage, Hunting, Sixth Sense, Tracking, Healing, Weaponskill, Mindshield, Mindblast, Animal Kinship and Mind Over Matter. These matter constantly. A section might say that if you have Sixth Sense you should turn to one number and otherwise to another; Healing restores ENDURANCE as you walk; Mindblast adds to your COMBAT SKILL against most enemies. Different selections produce genuinely different journeys through the same book.

Combat uses a Combat Ratio — your COMBAT SKILL minus the enemy's — and a Combat Results Table. Each round you pick a random number, cross-reference it with the ratio, and read off how much ENDURANCE both sides lose. When a book is completed, the hero keeps his disciplines and special items and gains one new discipline before starting the next. From the sixth book, the Magnakai series, the disciplines advance again, and later the Grand Master books push Lone Wolf toward near-mythic power.

This is why Lone Wolf is often described as the most "RPG-like" of the classic gamebooks. It is still a solo experience with fixed text and no game master — but the sense of a character who grows over years of play is the same one a tabletop campaign offers.

Reception & impact

Lone Wolf was one of the great successes of the 1980s gamebook craze. Flight from the Dark drew a 7 out of 10 review in White Dwarf in December 1984, and the series grew through four cycles: the Kai (books 1–5), Magnakai (6–12), Grand Master (13–20) and New Order (21 onward), in which the reader plays one of Lone Wolf's students. The original run ended with book 28, The Hunger of Sejanoz, in 1998. By Dever's account the books sold more than 12 million copies in over 30 countries and 18 languages. The saga also spread into spin-off gamebooks — Ian Page's World of Lone Wolf, starring the wizard Grey Star — and into John Grant's Legends of Lone Wolf novels.

Legacy

In 1999 Dever gave the volunteer organization Project Aon permission to publish the books free on the web, a rare act of generosity that has kept the saga playable ever since. Mongoose Publishing produced Lone Wolf: The Roleplaying Game (2004–2013) and reissued expanded editions of the gamebooks from 2007, including a rewritten Flight from the Dark. Book 29 finally appeared in 2016, eighteen years after book 28, and further books were completed after Dever's death in November 2016 by his son Ben Dever with Vincent Lazzari, working from his notes. Digital adaptations, including Forge Reply's Joe Dever's Lone Wolf (from 2013), carried Magnamund to phones and consoles.

Beside Fighting Fantasy and Choose Your Own Adventure, Lone Wolf completes the trinity of 1980s gamebooks — and of the three, it is the one that most clearly anticipates the persistent, levelling hero of the computer RPG and the modern solo roleplaying scene.