I have a (probably bad) habit of periodically checking video game sales to see if there's a good sale on a game that had fallen off my radar or possibly didn't know about. Usually there's nothing I haven't seen before, but this week I did a double take as I stumbled across a sale of a game called Joe Dever's Lone Wolf.
This awakened all kinds of feels in me.
You see, before I played Dungeons & Dragons, before I decided I wanted to be a writer, I was kid who discovered Lone Wolf in her school library. They were like choose your own adventure books, but with game mechanics in them and a random number table in the back so you could do combat or encounter different results when trying the same action.
Lone Wolf was your protagonist, but you could build him with different skills, and what skills he possessed led to different options as you read through your adventure. Being able to talk to animals might allow the animals in question to lead you to a secret route you wouldn't otherwise find. Being skilled in camouflage might allow you to hide when you otherwise couldn't.
Lone Wolf even "leveled up" between adventures, gaining one new skill for each book the player completed, and the series itself was a continuing storyline that followed Lone Wolf from a slacking student who survived the massacre of his order by dumb luck to a grand master of his kind.
I read a review to see if the game was any good (and surprisingly for a licensed title it seems to be) and it was funny seeing someone refer to the Giaks as Lone Wolf's version of orcs, because to me, Giaks predated my knowledge of orcs, and even now that I know what orcs are, I still don't see them as the same. (For what it's worth, I picture Giaks as being smaller and a bit more cowardly. Closer to being big goblins than orcs.)
Reading about the game reminded me of all the lore, the setting and the monsters, that I devoured as a kid. While I didn't think much of the game's character design (Lone Wolf looks like he's going to an Assassin's Creed audition), the writing itself was apparently the late Joe Dever's final project, and knowing that the author himself was penning the script gives me some hope that was otherwise lost on seeing Lone Wolf skulking around in black. (What happened to the green cloak of the Kai Lords? The color is so famous that in some books he gets identified immediately by other people when he wears it.)
I decided to buy the game (it was on sale, and as of this writing, it still is), because I hadn't journeyed as Lone Wolf in years, and because the game is supposed to be in continuity with the books, I decided that I needed a refresher.
One thing Joe Dever did that was incredibly kind to his fans, is give permission for his most of books to be uploaded to the web, free of charge, and you can read them at the fan run Project Aon. All of his Lone Wolf game books are there, though the novelizations are not (much to my dismay, because most of them were never published in the US and teenage me had been reading them). Unfortunately he passed away leaving his New Order sequel series unfinished, but it looks like his son and a co-author are trying to finish it.
In prep for playing the game, I started noodling through the game books and I'm rather surprised by how much I remember. Not always in regards to specific decisions, but the worldbuilding. I knew vordaks were! And that they are not to be messed with as a scrub initiate. Drakkarim are human enemies though, the only humans in the Darklords' armies. I also got to meet my magician friend Banedon again (and two more times as I kept reading)!
The books feel a bit dated now, especially with its less than flattering portrayal of people from Middle Eastern and Alaskan-themed lands. Lone Wolf can get screwed over by people of all nationalities (there's a reason you can choose Sixth Sense as a skill), but it's notable that the Middle Eastern country actually allies with the Darklords and the pseudo-Alaskans are introduced as "ice barbarians" who are so hostile even their children are shooting at you while riding on their parents' backs.
Though if you want to look at the story through a more progressive lens, Lone Wolf could be read as gay or bi, since the second person narrative repeatedly notes that certain men are handsome. (It's probably unintentional, but it's definitely something I didn't notice as a kid.)
Also hailing from a more simplistic time, is some of the decision-making, where shooting first and asking questions later is okay, even if you're the good guy. There's one time when you need to find out who tried to poison you and no clues as to who it was, and the way you accuse someone is by attacking them. Even if that's not the best way to find out who's your would-be assassin, fighting is generally something you don't want to do too often (unless you have the Healing skill), because healing potions are hard to come by, so getting into a fight just to get it wrong is rather clunky. Fortunately most of the time you can choose to run away from non-monster fights if you prefer not to kill someone.
One thing I was surprised about though is how little Lone Wolf's gender is referred to, which might be one of the reasons I got into the series as deeply as I did. I don't think it's until the sixth book that Lone Wolf is specifically referred to by another character as "he." Though there's a blond teenage boy on the cover, the book is written in second person, so it's easy to read without paying attention.
True, he's a "Kai Lord" (eventually), but the novelization established that the Kai Lords trained both boys and girls, so even referring to him as that felt gender neutral to me.
I figure I'll go through the original twenty books (it sounds like a lot, but they're fast reads since you don't go straight through) and then dive into the video game. I'll skip the New Order sequel series since follows a new protagonist. Unsurprisingly after twenty books Lone Wolf himself is pretty dang powerful and probably doesn't need to level up anymore! And I assume that's the point when the video game picks up, when he's no longer a teenage boy, but the man who's rebuilt his fallen order.
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