I really loved Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf game books as a 12-13-y-o. I strongly preferred them to Fighting Fantasy, thanks in large part to there being a fleshed out world from the start, and to the story being so epic, not just one dungeon after another. And I love Gary Chalk’s illusions! (Though Russ Nicholson certainly wasn’t bad either.)
Yesterday I played the first LW book, Flight From The Dark (1984), for the first time in maybe 35 years. It went quickly and I did well. Today, of course, I see that the fantasy world of Magnamund is extremely cliché-laden, but the adventures were never intended for people of upper middle age who have read far too much fantasy. Something that stands out as strange, though, is how non-adventurous this solo adventure is if you play sensibly and strive to win.
The task you take on in the book is to travel a bit more than 100 km through a war-torn countryside southeast from the Kai monastery (a kind of military academy) to Sommerlund’s capital, Holmgard. There you have to inform the king that the Kai Order has sadly been wiped out by an air raid. You get many chances to go in the wrong direction. You get many chances to seek out danger. But why would a scared, traumatised teenager with something he views as an important task do that? You always have good opportunities to go in the right direction and avoid the dangers you encounter. And if you do that, you win in no time.
I only ended up fighting twice. Once when I stumbled into the fringe of a pitched battle and fought a large lizard man who threatened to kill the heir to the throne, Prince Pelathar (§97). The second was when I took a shortcut through one of Holmgard’s cemeteries towards the end of my journey and fell through the roof of an underground vault. Down there was a magical statue of a winged snake that for some reason wanted to fight. Perhaps it was placed there as protection against grave robbers.
The end of the book is a bit silly. “Oh no,” says the king, “has the entire Kai Order been wiped out? The organisation that trained all the officers in my army? Is this boy the only one left alive? Now, goshdarnit, we need the magical Sommerswerd, which is in long-term storage in the neighbouring kingdom! Who shall I send there? Well, why not this kid?! He has undeniably managed to travel more than a hundred klicks in a given direction and fled from a lot of dangers! Let’s send him!”