The Wildlands Hunt by Martin Charbonneau and Gary Chalk | review by Rafe McGregor

The Wildlands Hunt is the second instalment of the new Lone Wolf gamebook series, which began with The Pit of Darkness in 2017, and follows the adventures of New Order Kai Konor Autumn Snow. Like its predecessor, The Wildlands Hunt is crowdfunded, with progression from funding to delivery proceeding much quicker and smoother the second time around. The project was launched on 28 January 2017, received the required initial funding of €4000 the following day, received €15,000 within a fortnight, and the volume was published in October 2018. Megara Entertainment was founded in 2007 and director Mikaël Louys appears to have been transparent about the company’s financial situation throughout. In March this year, for example, Megara published a hardback collector’s edition of Grey Star the Wizard. This was the first in a short spin-off series – The World of Lone Wolf – that followed the adventures of Grey Star, a Shianti wizard. The four books were written by Ian Page, illustrated by Paul Bonner, and edited by Joe Dever, creator of Lone Wolf and Lone Wolf’s world, Magnamund. Grey Star the Wizard (1985) was succeeded by The Forbidden City (1985), Beyond the Nightmare Gate (1985) and War of the Wizards (1986), making 1985 the most prolific year for the franchise, with The World of Lone Wolf 1–3 published alongside Lone Wolf 4–6 (The Chasm of Doom, Shadow on the Sand and The Kingdoms of Terror). On the Kickstarter updates, Louys reveals that Megara published Grey Star the Wizard at a loss, selling a disappointing two hundred copies. He seems undeterred, however, and after revision of the production model, launched The Forbidden City project as Grey Star the Wizard was released. The campaign has reached €11,845, exceeding its €8000 goal, although the stated delivery date of December 2018 is likely overambitious. For those who have followed the vicissitudes of Lone Wolf publication (which I related in my reviews of Lone Wolf 21: Voyage of the Moonstone and Lone Wolf 29: The Storms of Chai), it will come as no surprise to hear that Megara are currently in the midst of financial problems. The Wildlands Hunt is printed in the same format as The Pit of Darkness (medium octavo hardback), retails at €40 (delivery included), and is only available from the Megara website (www.megara-entertainment.com).  I ordered my copy on 12 October (the transaction cost me a total of just under £37, but no doubt this will rise in direct proportion to Brexit chaos). On 12 November, I received an email from Louys stating that there had been a delay caused by issues with investors. The book arrived on 24 November, along with a free copy of the collector’s edition of Fabled Lands 1: The War-Torn Kingdom by Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson (first published in 1996; published by Megara in 2014). My assessment is that Megara are scrupulously honest, but that until the publishing uncertainty is resolved, buyers should be wary. On a related note, I must admit to not contributing to either Autumn Snow Kickstarter project – as much as I long for more Lone Wolf gamebooks, past experience has made me wary of paying any small presses upfront.

Like The Pit of Darkness, The Wildlands Hunt has been released in French and English and combines the literary expertise of Martin Charbonneau with the artistic expertise of Gary Chalk. The volume is a perfect companion to The Pit of Darkness, with another wonderful colour cover by Chalk, twenty new full-page black and white illustrations, and several smaller ones that I didn’t recognise from previous publications.  Chalk’s artwork is widely-praised for an instantly-recognisable style that foregrounds clear lines, the use of negative space, and deliberately disproportionate figures. His drawings are also incredibly expressive, as a quick comparison of the illustrations for sections 65, 140 and 318 reveals. The first depicts the Ragadorn city guard, three men oozing so much menace and hostility that the picture alone motivated my decision to avoid the encounter. The Red Mask slaver in 140 looks just as deadly and dangerous, but Chalk’s representation provides a subtle invitation to the player to take up combat. Finally, the stagecoach ticket-seller is depicted with consummate pathos, imprisoned behind the bars of his counter, lending a melancholy mood to what purports to be an occasion for celebration. In keeping with The Pit of Darkness, there is no colour map in The Wildlands Hunt (these have been a mainstay of the Lone Wolf series to date), but my parcel arrived with a separate map (in colour) of the city of Ragadorn (where the second part of the adventure takes place). While I appreciate the gesture from Megara, I thought it detracted from the high production values of the gamebook, a laminated A4 sheet (too big to be slipped inside the book) that is functional rather than artistic and also superfluous to play (I didn’t use it at all). My review of The Pit of Darkness was critical of the number of typos and formatting errors, but there are much fewer of the former and none of the latter in the second instalment of the series (in my gameplay, anyway). There are, however, occasionally unusual turns of phrase and I wonder if this is a consequence of translation from the original French. At times these can simply read a little awkwardly, but one instance seems to make a racial slur against a particular character – which, permissible though it might be in a fantasy world is unnecessarily provocative in the context of publication and incongruous with the humanism that pervades the franchise. (I have not read the French version, though, so it may well be the result of a loss in translation.)

I gave The Pit of Darkness high praise for its balance in terms of gaming: difficult but not impossible; solving the perennial problem of healing and endurance point recovery; and presenting progressively more challenging encounters. The second and third of these hold for The Wildlands Hunt, which adds two more welcome elements. First, the use of the Kai disciplines is perfectly pitched – they all prove useful somewhere and no one in particular is essential for completing the gamebook. Second, there is a clear game (although not narrative) structure: the adventure begins with Autumn Snow held prisoner on a pirate ship; she must then navigate the trials and tribulations of Ragadorn; finally, she ventures out into the Wildlands that separate Ragadorn from her homeland of Sommerlund. My only complaint with respect to the game is that I found it too easy. Granted, my version of Autumn Snow is now an Aspirant, able to use six rather than five Kai disciplines, but as she failed to accrue anything of great value in The Pit of Darkness, she isn’t particularly powerful. I have always equipped my various Kai characters – Lone Wolf, True Friend (in the New Order series), and now Autumn Snow – with a bow and this was especially useful in The Wildlands Hunt. On reflection, I wonder if it was too useful and that without it the Wildlands would have proved much more dangerous than they were in my gameplay. My main criticism of the gamebook is its narrative. Despite the exemplary game structure, the story itself fails to fit the overarching narrative initiated by The Pit of Darkness and to match the internal rigour of the various Lone Wolf series so far. The Pit of Darkness concluded with Autumn Snow losing her Kai mentor and discovering a Nadziranim (evil sorcerer) plot set to unfold in the Maakenmire swamp. The final section saw Autumn Snow on the island of Kirlu, headed for Misty Bay and thence to Sommerlund, where she would report to her Kai superiors in the hope of being dispatched on the mission to the Maakenmire. The title of the second adventure was revealed as Slaves of the Mire, which appeared to reference this mission. When the title was changed to The Wildlands Hunt, I assumed this would chart the journey of the mission from Sommerlund to the Maakenmire through the Wildlands. When I began playing The Wildlands Hunt, it seemed as if the slings and arrows of fortune had taken Autumn Snow off course and the hunt of the Wildlands would feature her as the hunted, attempting to reach Sommerlund by land rather than by sea, fleeing from enemies in Ragadorn. Instead, Autumn Snow is the hunter in the Wildlands, having teamed up with an new ally – Athania, captain of the Valkharim (personal guard to the Overlord of Ragadorn) – and pursuing an exciting but irresponsible digression from her duty to report to her Kai superiors. While in the Wildlands there is a further twist setting the whole campaign in a different direction, although the title of book three is (once again) Slaves of the Mire… so perhaps the overarching plot has not been lost after all. This sense of meandering over mission is replicated internally and while the whole game is fast-paced, much of the action seems incidental or supplementary. This is the first gamebook set in Dever’s Magnamund that has, in consequence of his untimely death in November 2016, been published without his guiding hand. Dever’s influence as a master gamer and accomplished storyteller defied detection, but is revealed in its absence – the lack of the economy, artifice and vision that have underpinned all of the previous gamebooks, including The Pit of Darkness. I concluded my review of the latter by stating that the series could be the best addition to Magnamund since the Magnakai campaign ended in 1988, but I fear that it has, like Autumn Snow herself, lost direction.

Autumn Snow 1: The Pit of Darkness, by Martin Charbonneau, Joe Dever and Gary Chalk (Megara Entertainment) | review by Rafe McGregor

Stephen Theaker has been kind enough to allow me to indulge my nostalgia for 1980s fantasy gamebooks in his magazine and over the course of three reviews – The Voyage of the Moonstone (TQF55), The Buccaneers of Shadaki, and The Storms of Chai (both TQF57) – I’ve charted the remarkable story of Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf series. The latest of my reports contains a couple of surprises of the kind I’ve come to expect by now, given the series’ incredibly complicated publishing history, characterised by first falling victim to and then being perpetuated by the domination of internet technology at the turn of the century. To begin at the beginning, I first found out about The Pit of Darkness courtesy of Project Aon (www.projectaon.org), the voluntary organisation that has done so much to keep the series alive during its many years in the publishing wilderness, in a bulletin listing the current availability of Lone Wolf products dated 8 July 2016. Megara Entertainment founder Mikaël Louys began crowdfunding for the volume in September 2014, the main purpose of which was to secure the services of the original Lone Wolf illustrator, Gary Chalk, who had an apparently acrimonious split with Dever between the release of Castle Death (#7, 1986) and The Jungle of Horrors (#8, 1987). The gamebook is only available from the Megara website direct (www.megara-entertainment.com) and has been released in both French and English versions. The two are presented distinctly on the website and although the price is quite steep (about £30 at the time of my purchase, no doubt more now), it includes postage and packaging and my copy arrived promptly and in perfect condition. I nonetheless have two small complaints about Megara. First, they don’t seem to advertise very well – I ordered immediately after following the link from Project Aon and the copy I received is already a “THIRD PRINTING, REVISED” – what happened to the first two printings? Second, and this may well be the reason for being in a third printing already (assuming all three were released in 2016), there are quite a few typos and formatting errors in the book (albeit all minor).

The volume itself is entirely pleasing, if printed in a slightly unusual format (a hardback that is either medium octavo in size or extremely close to it) with a wonderful colour cover by Chalk, around double the ten full-page black-and-white illustrations originally intended, and large easy-to-read print. Chalk’s artwork is highly stylised and his clear lines, imaginative use of negative space, and slightly disproportionate figures will be instantly recognisable to his fans from the eighties. His style is especially well-suited to children’s illustrations, in which market he has worked extensively, although I noted that the innocence and simplicity of his original Lone Wolf work has been eclipsed by a vision of Magnamund (the world of Lone Wolf) that is both more sinister and more intricately detailed. Chalk’s Vassagonian pirates are a perfect example, depicted in all their bloodthirsty savagery on the pages adjacent to sections 7 and 256 – not a Pirates-of-the-Caribbean-style comedy character in sight. The Pit of Darkness thus has two major selling points: it is the first Lone Wolf gamebook to unite Dever and Chalk in thirty years (Dever is credited as having “Edited and Augmented” the volume) and it is the first Lone Wolf gamebook to feature a female protagonist. The latter is particularly welcome, although in fairness to Dever the eighties wasn’t exactly a decade known for its equality of opportunity. Nor has the Kai Order eschewed gender discrimination entirely as male and female candidates are required to pursue different paths, the former to become New Order Kai Lords and the latter to become New Order Kai Konor. Autumn Snow is one of the latter, having joined the Konor when she was seven, mastered five of the ten Kai disciplines over the next seven years, and reached the rank of Initiate. The Lords and Konor study the same disciplines and this level of expertise puts Autumn Snow at precisely the same level as Lone Wolf at the beginning of the series, in Flight from the Dark (#1, 1984).

There is no explicit dating, but the story is set a year after Dawn of the Dragons (#18, 1992), presumably in MS 5081, while Lone Wolf is away, presumably on his last mission as a player character, The Curse of Naar (#20, 1993). This is a post-Darklords Magnamund, but is – just like our own post-Cold War world in the nineties – going through more than a few teething troubles. Autumn Snow is invited to join her principal instructor, Kai Lord Silver Flame, on what appears to be a routine investigation of sightings of former Darklands creatures on the Isle of Kirlu, which is part of the Kirlundian archipelago off the coast of Sommerlund. The first part of the gamebook takes place at sea, before Kirlu is reached, as the merchant ship on which Autumn Snow and Silver Flame are travelling is attacked by the aforementioned bloodthirsty savages. The battle involves a series of tough and exciting combats and leaves Autumn Snow the sole survivor of the crew, with Silver Flame missing in action presumed dead. Despite the fatal encounter with the pirates there is still a chance that the main mission is routine, but of course it proves not to be and when Autumn Snow arrives in Misty Bay after a dangerous journey on foot, she learns that Giaks (Magnamund’s orcs) have been sighted in the ruins of Wytch Aieta Nematah’s citadel. Autumn Snow infiltrates the ruins, finds a lot more than Giaks to fight, and the final part of the gamebook switches from a wilderness to a dungeon adventure (to use the old Dungeons & Dragons terminology). The Pit of the title lies beneath the ruins and it quickly becomes evident that the appearance of the Vassagonian pirates was no accident as the Vassagonians and Drakkarim, two of Magnamund’s most evil human races, are in league together.

From a gaming point of view, I thought the level of difficulty was particularly well-pitched, the mission challenging rather than suicidal. The toughest combat is probably with the Pit itself and players will need one of the disciplines of Mindblast, Mindshield, or a high initial Combat Skill to survive. With regard to disciplines, I found Tracking useful and – as always – Weaponskill and Healing, although Martin Charbonneau has introduced his own take on the latter. With regard to the actual mechanics of play (which follows the Lone Wolf gamebooks exactly and also has the traditional 350 sections), I was very interested to see that a third option is being tried for the Healing discipline. Back when I first came to the series in the mid-eighties Healing allowed one point of Endurance to be restored for each section where one was not involved in combat. When I chose my five disciplines, Healing was my first choice, followed by Weaponskill (the former to restore my character’s Endurance, the latter to boost his Combat Skill) and I can’t imagine how anyone could have managed without both. Dever must have decided that Healing was too powerful – and, in retrospect, with the Sommerswerd, Healing, and a bit of commonsense I don’t think there was too much to challenge Lone Wolf post-Darklords – because in The Voyage of the Moonstone (#21, 1994), which launched the New Order series, a limit was placed on the amount of Endurance the discipline could be used to restore. In The Pit of Darkness, the limit is gone and Endurance is restored at the rate of two points rather than one, but only at selected sections (indicated by a grey rather than black section number). There are naturally never any grey sections around when you need them, but allowing for the fact that I’ve only used this system in a single gameplay I think it is the best so far and part of the reason for the balance I noted – not too easy, like the Kai Grand Master series (books 13 to 20), or too hard, like the tail end of the New Order series (books 21 to 32). Having discovered the secret of the Pit, the adventure ends with Autumn Snow en route to the Maakenmire, a swamp south of the Wildlands. The second Autumn Snow adventure is Slaves of the Mire, but there are no publication details available in The Pit of Darkness or on the Megara website. My worry as I write this is that it will have to be crowdfunded too, in which case we’re unlikely to see it in print for two years (given the rate at which The Pit of Darkness was printed). Hopefully, that’s not the case, especially if the series is reaching new fans with Dever completing the long-awaited final four New Order adventures. I think the Autumn Snow series could be an outstanding addition to Magnamund – the best since the Magnakai series ended with The Masters of Darkness (#12, 1988) – but word will need to spread beyond the Megara website if it is to reach its potential.

Lone Wolf 29: The Storms of Chai, by Joe Dever (Holmgard Press) | review by Rafe McGregor

Note that the following Lone Wolf review was written and supplied before we heard the sad news of Joe Dever’s death. Our commiserations to his family, and to all of his fans.

In my review of Lone Wolf 22: The Buccaneers of Shadaki above I mentioned that Joe Dever is now self-publishing the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks, after close on twenty years of problems with first Red Fox, then Mongoose Publishing, and most recently German publisher Mantikore Verlag. One would have hoped that after all the trials and tribulations suffered by both Dever and his fans at the non-profit Project Aon (www.projectaon.org), his decision to take charge of the process himself would have run smoothly, but alas this was not the case. The Storms of Chai is book 29 in the Lone Wolf series as a whole and the ninth adventure in the New Order series, which rebooted with a new player persona in Lone Wolf 21: Voyage of the Moonstone (reviewed in #55). The New Order series was published at the rate of two books a year from 1994 to 1998, by which reckoning The Storms of Chai would have been published in 1999. With Dever at the helm after seventeen years, the long-awaited adventure – which had been sold out on pre-orders – was due for release in April 2016. There was a delay with the printers and it seemed as if the Lone Wolf project had stalled yet again. The book was finally released in mid-May and with a stack of further pre-orders to meet, Dever ordered a second edition printed. In yet another improbable twist in the Lone Wolf story, a second first edition was printed and although the books are exactly the same, the difference in paper used by the Turkish (fat) and Lithuanian (thin) printers has resulted in the former being substantially thicker and heavier than the latter (Dever explains the full story on the book order page: www.mapmagnamund.com/id72.html). There are no copies of the fat edition left and my copy (which is still available at the time of writing) is the later, thin one. As I mentioned in my review of The Buccaneers of Shadaki, I have suffered at the hands of small presses on several occasions, but I had no problems whatsoever with my order, the price (£19.99) includes postage and packaging in the UK, and all copies purchased from Holmgard Press arrive with Dever’s seal and signature.

The adventure begins in the early spring of MS 5102, seventeen years after the conclusion of Lone Wolf 28: The Hunger of Sejanoz (a conceit that neatly encapsulates the delay between planned and actual publication), which is not a problem for my Kai Grandmaster, True Friend, who only ages one year for every five (albeit at the cost of a silly name). The volume has a unique addition for a Lone Wolf collector’s edition, a “Timeline of notable events in Magnamund”, which covers the interim since True Friend put paid to the Autarch Sejanoz. In summary: various hordes of evil minions have been sallying forth from such fell places as the Doomlands of Naaros, Kraknalorg Chasm, and the Chasm of Gorgoron; the god Kai appeared before Lone Wolf to (somewhat belatedly in my opinion) warn him that Naar is up to his evil tricks again, following which – in MS 5101 – the Grand Brumalmarc of the Icelands and his ice demon allies attempted to invade the homeland of Sommerlund and seismic disturbances opened a gigantic chasm in the Darklands that extended the dreaded Maakengorge. Magnamund is, it seems, literally being rocked, and subterranean denizens that should never see the light of day are pouring onto its surface.


True Friend has spent most of the above years quietly, supervising the construction of the new Kai Monastery on the Isle of Lorn and taking command when Lone Wolf has been absent. The adventure begins with Lone Wolf returning to the monastery to hold a council, where he reveals that Magnamund is indeed under a coordinated attack by an unknown force. There are six armies attacking six different locations and the top six ranking Kai Grandmasters are despatched accordingly. Following True Friend’s slaying of Sejanoz, Chai rallied the New Kingdom armies to inflict a decisive defeat on Bhanar, but after more than a decade of peace, a Nadziranim sorcerer named Bakhasa (who has a nasty habit of raising the dead as unpleasant versions of their former cheery selves) has seized the remote Bhanarian city of Bakhasa. Zashnor is now in command of an Agarashi horde from the Doomlands and appears to have constructed a new Claw of Naar in an attempt to succeed where Sejanoz failed, in invading Chai. True Friend’s mission is to recover the Eye of Agarash from the new Khea-Khan before Zashnor can retrieve it and create a weapon of mass destruction by joining it with the replica Claw. The action begins with an airborne deployment to Chai and True Friend must race against the invading army to reach Pensei, the capital. The bulk of both the action and the story involve a prolonged but nonetheless exciting flight across Chai, from Pensei to Valus. The traditional combat finale of the first twenty-eight books has been replaced by a trio of final combats: first, Klüz, the Doomgah leader; then Xaol the Necromancer, raised from the dead since True Friend last killed him in Lone Wolf 25: Trail of the Wolf; and finally, Zashnor himself – along with his Zlanbeast. Each of these is a tough combat and there is little opportunity to rest between them, which brings me to my only criticism of a gamebook that otherwise meets all seventeen years’ worth of expectations.


This is a very hard game to play and the difficulty is purely attritional: first, Zashnor has amassed a formidable army that is already rampaging around Chai when True Friend arrives in-country; second, once True Friend has the Eye of Agarash it exerts a long-term draining effect that pops up when least expected; third, in my gameplay there was only one opportunity for all of True Friend’s endurance points to be restored and that relatively early on; finally, in my gameplay there were two occasions when two or more items of precious equipment were lost without the opportunity to recover or replace them. All of which to say that I think that The Storms of Chai would be nigh impossible to survive out of order – i.e., without True Friend having reached the rank of Sun Thane (level thirty-two out of a maximum of thirty-six) – and, for that matter, without the Grandmaster skills of both Deliverance and Weaponmastery. The volunteers at Project Aon have, amongst their many other services to Lone Wolf fans worldwide, helpfully provided a flow chart of each of the first twenty-eight books and although I suspect that the narrative of book 29 is no more linear than any of the others, the constant fighting against powerful enemies of all sorts makes it feel like what would be called a “hack and slash” dungeon crawl in Dungeons & Dragons. Certainly, this is one of the gamebooks where brawn (and luck) counts more than brains, although it is an entirely gripping hack and slash. The story ends with two unanswered questions: first, how did Zashnor get hold of the real Claw of Naar, which was supposed to be safe in Dessi? Second, who or what is the power behind the new assault on Magnamund? The first is revealed in the bonus adventure; the second will, one hopes, be at least partially answered in Lone Wolf 30: Dead in the Deep. The bonus adventure is “The Tides of Gorgoron” (written by Dever and Vincent Lazarri), where the reader adopts the persona of Lord Elkamo Doko, a Vakeros warrior-mage, a group of warriors who have been taught some of the skills of magic by the Elder Magi of Dessi. Lord Doko begins as second-in-command of a force sent to defend the Colo Bridge from the advancing Agarashi. The adventure is very entertaining, has a direct link to the narrative of The Storms of Chai, and the warrior-mage player character is perfectly-pitched – neither too similar nor too dissimilar to a Kai Grandmaster, thus making a perfect complement. Rafe McGregor

Lone Wolf 22: The Buccaneers of Shadaki, by Joe Dever (Mantikore Verlag/Holmgard Press) | review by Rafe McGregor

Note that the following Lone Wolf review was written and supplied before we heard the sad news of Joe Dever’s death. Our commiserations to his family, and to all of his fans.

In #55, I reviewed the collector’s edition of Lone Wolf 21: Voyage of the Moonstone, published in English by Mantikore Verlag in 2015. The review was more of a reflection on the whole series, summarising the thirty years between my first reading of Lone Wolf 1: Flight From the Dark to the point where, after numerous improbable narrative twists, there once again seemed to be a delay in publishing. The short version: Lone Wolf was originally conceived as a series of thirty-two gamebooks, the first of which was published in 1984, stalled – apparently forever – in 1998 at Lone Wolf 28: The Hunger of Sejanoz, and has been the subject of many and varied attempts to both finish the series and return all its instalments to print. I concluded by noting that although Mantikore Verlag’s taking over of the series from Mongoose Publishing in 2013 was an initial success, it seemed to have run into trouble in the second year. On 1 April 2016, shortly after I submitted the review, Joe Dever announced that he was self-publishing the rest of the collector’s edition series, including the previously unpublished four books. I must admit I was disappointed by the news, after the heroic efforts the fans at Project Aon (www.projectaon.org), a non-profit organisation, had made on Dever’s behalf, but I’m pleased to report that Holmgard Press (www.mapmagnamund.com) is flourishing. Lone Wolf 29: The Storms of Chai (also reviewed in this issue) was published in June and Dever is also selling the Mantikore Verlag volumes that are still in stock, books 18 and 22. Having suffered at the hands of small presses on several occasions myself, I’ll add that I had no problems whatsoever with my purchase of The Storms of Chai and that the price (£17.95) includes postage and packaging in the UK. In addition, all copies purchased from Holmgard Press arrive with Dever’s seal and signature (for those who set store by such things).

Returning to The Buccaneers of Shadaki, my Kai Grandmaster – True Friend – had put in the kind of performance his wimpy name would lead one to expect in his mission to return the Moonstone to the Isle of Lorn and found himself in the city of Elzian at the end of Voyage of the Moonstone. In my previous review I mentioned that the gamebooks have moved through distinct series as the overarching story progressed: a single campaign in the Kai and Magnakai series (books 1 through 12), followed by a series of standalone adventures in the Grand Master series (13 to 20) all with the same character, Lone Wolf. Voyage of the Moonstone marked the beginning of the fourth series, the New Order, in which the reader adopts the persona of one of Lone Wolf’s acolytes, and it was not clear whether the twelve books of the New Order would take the form of a single campaign or more standalone adventures. Dever seems to be employing a third, hybrid, option, with some New Order missions being standalone and others spanning more than one book (about which I shall have more to say below). The second half of the Moonstone quest takes True Friend “deep into the wild and lawless reaches of southern Magnamund”, which will only be familiar to those readers who played Ian Page’s regrettably short-lived spin-off series, The World of Lone Wolf (four gamebooks were published by Beaver Books from 1985 to 1986, beginning with Grey Star the Wizard).


This survey of the southern continent is the book’s greatest strength and the narrative is a sequence of fascinating explorations of and mini-adventures in the ports between Elzian and Lorn: from the emporium of Zharloum to the junkyard that is Dlash-da Ralzuha to a run-in with Sesketera, the despot of Ghol-Tabras; from the ruined splendour of Caeno, with its famous guanza derby, to the austerity of Nhang, with its eighty stone statues, and finally the Port of Suhn, ruled by the wizard Grey Star (hero of The World of Lone Wolf). The southern continent of Magnamund is every bit as interesting as its northern counterpart, where Lone Wolf cut his teeth, but The Buccaneers of Shadaki is more of a guidebook than a gamebook, even if it is a guidebook no one should be without. The combat finale is with a Zhürc, which might be a sea dragon and might not – one cannot be certain because there is no illustration – and provides an anti-climax either way. The creature on the eye-catching cover, drawn by Manuel Leza Moreno, is a scary sea crocodile called a Nigumu-sa that appears much earlier on, between Ghol-Tabras and Masama, but despite its presence the adventure as a game is altogether too easy.


One of the problems that has emerged in the New Order series was evident in some of the Grandmaster series: when one is playing a single character, who advances in prowess and power with each adventure but who is not involved in a campaign – working his way through increasingly difficult minions of an evil archenemy, for example – it becomes difficult for the author to maintain both the peril factor and a minimal degree of realism. True Friend is a Kai Grandmaster Senior at the beginning of Lone Wolf 21, which means that he is advanced to twenty-five out of a maximum of thirty-six levels of expertise and has several supernatural abilities. If Dever had opted to make The Buccaneers of Shadaki more challenging, he would have had to put some pretty tough opponents in relatively innocuous settings – but it would be stretching the imagination too far if street thugs and hungry animals were capable of taking on one of the most fearsome warriors on the continent. This is one of the reasons that I prefer a campaign to a series of standalone adventures. Speaking of which, like all the other Mantikore Verlag/Holmgard Press collector’s editions, this 574pp volume includes a bonus adventure, “A Wytch’s Nightmare” (written by Vincent Lazzari and Alexander Kühnert). The reader’s persona is the Wytch Yenna, her mission is to find the missing Grey Star, and the writers’ use of a female protagonist makes a very welcome change (true to its eighties origins, the various Lone Wolf protagonists have hitherto been exclusively male).


As my next review will be of Lone Wolf 29, I shall conclude this one with a brief summary of books 23 to 28. The Buccaneers of Shadaki ends with the promise of “a new and sinister threat to the fragile peace of Magnamund”. That threat is Baron Sadanzo and his robber-knights and Mydnight’s Hero (#23, first published in 1995) sees True Friend assisting the exiled Prince of Siyen to reclaim his father’s kingdom. Rune War (#24, 1995) returns the action to the Stornlands, a war-torn region in northern Magnamund where Lord Vandyan of Eldenora has used the Runes of Agarash to raise a reptilian breed of warrior. While Lone Wolf leads the crusade against Eldenora’s army, True Friend must break into the fortress of Skull-Tor to destroy the runes and his success sees him rise to become the second most powerful Kai Grandmaster. Shortly after the victory against Eldenora, Lone Wolf is abducted by a necromancer named Xaol and True Friend rescues him from Gazad Helkona in Trail of the Wolf (#25, 1997). (Unfortunately, the plot of rescuing friends or allies has been a little over-employed in the series, especially if one includes the standalone graphic novel spin-off, The Skull of Agarash, published in 1994, and “A Wytch’s Nightmare”.) Meanwhile, the greedy Dwarves of Bor have dug too deep in search of wealth, released an ancient horror called the Shom’zaa, and require True Friend’s assistance to defend their Throne Chamber in The Fall of Blood Mountain (#26, 1997). (As another aside, I should mention that this is currently the rarest of all the books; a second-hand copy was sold for just over £1000 on Amazon in August.) Vampirium (#27, 1998) takes a slight change of direction in that it initiates a series of events that will (it seems) dominate the remaining five books. The Autarch Sejanoz of Bhanar despatches a mission to excavate the Claw of Naar from the ruin of Naaros and True Friend must intercept the party before it returns to the capital. Sejanoz proceeds with the invasion of Chai without the Claw in The Hunger of Sejanoz (#28, 1998) and True Friend is sent to escort the Khea-Khan to safety. The Hunger of Sejanoz was published with only three hundred (as opposed to the usual three hundred and fifty) gameplay sections – I am not sure why – but Dever has plans to remedy this… all of which will be discussed in my review of The Storms of Chai.

Lone Wolf 21: Voyage of the Moonstone Collector’s Edition, by Joe Dever (Mantikore Verlag) | review by Rafe McGregor

I wonder if (m)any readers remember the thrill of picking up The Warlock of Firetop Mountain for the first time? Of realising that they hadn’t lost their thread in the real world, but were lost in the maze under the mountain? Or of not realising they were in the maze until the appearance of the deadly Minotaur? Firetop Mountain, the brainchild of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, was the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, published by Puffin in August 1982. The series was a great success, with fifty-nine books available by 1995. The first instalment nonetheless remained the most popular, spawning two sequels – Return to Firetop Mountain (#50, 1992) and Legend of Zagor (#54, 1993) – various spin-off products, and reprinting as late as 2010. I find it difficult to convey the excitement of Fighting Fantasy to twenty-first century readers, but one must remember that they appeared in a decade without the internet or household computers, where “TV games” (for those who could afford them) were restricted to Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Unlike the Choose Your Own Adventure series, which was well underway when Firetop Mountain appeared, Fighting Fantasy was aimed at young adults rather than children, with the best adventures combining compelling storytelling with pleasing terror at what awaited in the next numbered section. I must have played Firetop Mountain for the first time in 1985 or 1986, but quickly left Fighting Fantasy for a newer series. Lone Wolf was written by Joe Dever and launched with Flight from the Dark, first published by Sparrow in 1984. Where Fighting Fantasy were all standalone adventures, some of which took place in different universes, Lone Wolf adventures were self-contained but constituted an extended quest by a single character who progressed to new levels of expertise in a vividly-drawn and complex world called Magnamund. The epic began with the extermination of the Kai – an order of warriors dedicated to protecting the nation of Sommerlund as well as the rest of the free (medievally-speaking) world – at the hands of the demonic Darklords of Helgedad. Readers adopted the persona of Kor-Skarn (Lone Wolf), the sole survivor of the Darklord attack, and his first mission was to convey the bad news to the king. The missions became gradually more challenging as Lone Wolf advanced in power and ended up with the destruction of the Darklords in The Masters of Darkness (#12, 1988). The road to Helgedad and beyond was a rocky one, however, no more so than for Dever himself.

The first sign of the troubles ahead began between books 7 and 8, Castle Death (1986) and The Jungle of Horrors (1987), when Dever had an acrimonious split with his illustrator. Once the Darklords were destroyed and the (New Order of the) Kai re-established, there seemed little work left for Kor-Skarn, but Dever launched the Grand Master series with The Plague Lords of Ruel in 1990. Although readers continue with the same character, who had by now reached unprecedented levels of power, there was no overarching epic quest and each new adventure saw Lone Wolf troubleshooting evil in a previously unexplored region of Magnamund. I must admit my interest flagged a little at this stage – partly due to my age, no doubt, but also because I found the individual missions something of an anti-climax after the extended campaign of the first dozen. If some, like me, left the fold temporarily, replacements must have been pouring in as the Grand Master series raced to its conclusion in The Curse of Naar (#20, 1993). Kor-Skarn’s powers were now demigod-like and Dever did something risky but astute, introducing a new persona for readers. Twelve books were planned for the New Order series, beginning with Voyage of the Moonstone in 1994. The second New Order adventure, The Buccaneers of Shadakai, was published in the same year, but Red Fox had concerns about the internet-technology-inspired loss of interest in gamebooks and dropped Dever after The Hunger of Sejanoz (#28, 1998).

Dever then made another wise decision, authorising a group of enthusiasts calling themselves “Project Aon” to upload all of the gamebooks as free ebooks in various platforms, i.e. used precisely the technology that had killed the series to maintain interest. Such was the fan base that all twenty-eight books were made available over the next fifteen years (Project Aon completed in 2014 and can be found at www.projectaon.org). In the interim, the secondhand market for Lone Wolf paperbacks went berserk. There had been some problem with the publication of The Buccaneers of Shadakai, the result of which was that it sold out almost immediately in 1994. Five years later, copies were selling for hundreds of pounds. I confess to spending the most I have ever spent on a book (£200) at a time when I really couldn’t afford it (1999) to acquire a copy (left on my town centre doorstep by the postman). A new copy of the same paperback is now going for £999 on Amazon. The final instalment is currently the most sought after: The Hunger of Sejanoz varies between £699 and £999 for used copies.

The gamble with Project Aon seemed to pay off in 2004 when Mongoose Publishing launched a Lone Wolf Role Playing Game. The following year, however, Dever underwent surgery for cancer and was out of the public eye for some time. In 2010, with Dever fully-recovered, Mongoose announced that they would republish all the Lone Wolf books in a hardback Collector’s Edition, with new illustrations and fresh revisions by Dever. The books were priced at about £15, very reasonable given the quality of the covers, paper, and binding, and Mongoose furthermore offered a Megadeal: all twenty-eight plus the previously unpublished books 29 to 32 for something like £300 (a substantial saving). Despite my previous profligacy I was wary, having been burned by small presses before (and since). I was initially proved wrong, with seventeen books released in three years, but there was a lull of a few months in 2012 and the following February Dever announced (via Project Aon) that he and Mongoose had split by mutual consent. Two further announcements followed in quick succession: the German Mantikore Verlag would be publishing books 18 to 28 (in English) in the same Collector’s Edition format (March) as well as the final four volumes (April).

Mantikore published book 18, Dawn of the Dragons, in May 2013 and began the New Order series with the Collector’s Edition of Voyage of the Moonstone – which this review is supposed to be about – last year. The Buccaneers of Shadakai was also published in 2015 and I have found them easiest to acquire via Amazon (rather than the publisher). The books appear to automatically revert to “unavailable” on the publication date, but can be bought at the same price (still £15-odd) via secondhand sellers (at least one of which is based in Germany). Regardless of what’s going on behind the scenes, all my Mantikore edition purchases have been entirely satisfactory – purchased more for support than anything else as the first gap in my collection is book 25. I’m not completely convinced I’ll ever hold a copy of Trail of the Wolf as publication appears to have slowed down again, although cover artwork is available for Mydnight’s Hero (#23) and The Storms of Chai (#29). According to Wikipedia, the series (published in numerous languages – there are three on Project Aon alone – and including numerous spin-offs) has sold eleven and a half million copies worldwide, but the real figure must be considerably higher given all the craziness on the secondhand market.

Voyage of the Moonstone begins thirty-three years after Flight from the Dark and readers must create a new character by use of the series’ standard method, a random number table. I’m afraid my New Order warrior has the rather delicate name of True Friend, but he is a Kai Grand Master, can kill you with his bare hands, live off the land indefinitely, and move small objects by looking at them, so you’d better not tease him about it. True Friend’s first mission is to return the magical artifact called the Moonstone (with which readers of the series will be familiar) to its rightful owners on the Isle of Lorne. One of the reasons Dever’s decision to reboot with True Friend was shrewd is because it does away with the only consistent criticism of books 3 to 20: that they are either too easy or too hard, depending upon the combination of whether one acquired the Sommerswerd (the broadsword to end all broadswords) at the end of Fire on the Water (#2, 1984) and one’s Kai level (determined by the number of books one has previously completed). I think the critique is overly harsh because I picked up the Sommerswerd on cue, but remained far from invulnerable – aside from which there are various other magic weapons to be found in unlikely places. Notwithstanding, True Friend has no such problems, carrying no Sommerswerd and with no previous adventures counting towards his skills.

Given my emotional and financial investment in Lone Wolf, I can hardly do anything other than recommend Voyage of the Moonstone. I shall, however, say that although the first New Order adventure is as good as many of the originals (and perhaps better than several of the Grand Master series), the finale – always a single combat with a particularly nasty denizen of Magnamund (or the Daziarn Plane) – is a little disappointing. The Otokh is a giant lightning-spinning sea-spider (depicted on the cover), which sounds sinister as I type, but wasn’t quite as menacing as some of the antagonists I’ve dispatched with the Sommerswerd. A regular feature of the Mantikore editions has been the inclusion of a bonus mini-adventure and the first New Order Collector’s Edition continues this practice with a return to Kor-Skarn entitled “Echoes of the Moonstone” (written by Eberhard Eschwe and Swen Harder). This is an unusual choice, subject to the problems noted above despite having a strategy for dealing with them, but is close to the main adventure in length so the reader at least gets two for one. Voyage of the Moonstone ends midway through the mission such that it is not clear whether True Friend will end up on an epic quest of the likes of his master’s early years or take over as Magnamund’s chief troubleshooter. The mission continues in The Buccaneers of Shadaki – going for a song at £13.71.