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Okay now, let me try and explain this.
Back nearly twenty years ago (oh god) I dug up an old gamebook in my school library. It was book 1 of the Lone Wolf series, Flight From the Dark. Needless to say, the library never saw that book again because I was a kleptomaniac little shit.
I adored that book, unlike many gamebooks *cough*fightingfantasy*cough* this one gave your character a- well, character. A pretty boring one, admittedly, but it’s a gamebook so the idea was you;’d do the legwork and personalise your guy.
Unlike other gamebooks, this one ended on a cliffhanger, and told the reader to go out and buy the next book Fire on the Water. I immediately rushed to my local bookstore and found… they had been out of print for about 10 years.
Well bollocks.
I found book 5 in a booksale, and acquired the incredibly rare books 21, 27 and 28 in a way I still am not feeling comfortable of divulging given how rare the were. And for 10 incredibly frustrating years, that was about it.
Then I saved a bit of money, went to university, discovered Ebay’s second hand book section, and lost all that money very quickly.
So I managed to accumulate a full Lone Wolf gamebook collection, which is not someone everyone can say. However, the series hadn’t actually been finished due to publisher arse-hattedness, so I tried to satisfy myself by tracking down all the Lone Wolf paraphenalia I could get my hands on.
(some of it ended up in the bin. John Grant should have been shot)
And that carried on for a few more years. Everything I had was at least 10 years old, the fandom was dead, Lone Wolf had been and gone and only a few people seemed to remember it.
What happened next can only be compared to what happened to the X-men fandom in 2011.
The fandom, which had been languishing in the doldrums for years since X3, was suddenly hit with First Class with about the same effect and lightning of frankenstein.
This is what the Lone Wolf fan feels right now.
We were muddling along on project Aon, doing our shit and bothering no one, and suddenly the books were snapped up by a number of major publishers for re-release. All at once all brake are off and everyone (not least of which the author, by the sounds of it) was on a rollercoaster no one expected. Video games! App adaptations! Roleplay games! Board games! Fan published works (Joe Dever is nice like that)
Frankly someone could announce a movie next week and I wouldn’t be surprised.
And part of my is wondering… why? What makes these books so popular? They’re pretty decent pulp fantasy fare, with gloriously cheesy prose and entire sentences of word salad names that I am sad to admit I understand completely.
I guess it’s because they are legitimately fun. The world is interesting, and can get really creative when Dever finally gets off medieval fantasy and goes full on techo-magi-punk in the later books. You can read almost anything into the main character, and since it’s a gamebook that really works, so you can roleplay your own interpretation of the character.
(Mine is idealistic, stubbornly good, very much in love with Banedon and struggles with PTSD. Book 18 is my favourite because he goes through HELL)
If you like fun pulp fantasy and enjoy cheese. I really encourage people to play them. The republished books are available and there originals are available for free on Project Aon.
(apart from fixing bugs, the only republished books which significantly differs from the originals is book one)
If you do want to play them, a word of advice: they will have to pry the magic spear from your cold, dead hands. Zakhan Kimoa is a bastard and only a fool trusts a taxidermist.
You’re welcome.
Okay now, let me try and explain this.
Back nearly twenty years ago (oh god) I dug up an old gamebook in my school library. It was book 1 of the Lone Wolf series, Flight From the Dark. Needless to say, the library never saw that book again because I was a kleptomaniac little shit.
I adored that book, unlike many gamebooks *cough*fightingfantasy*cough* this one gave your character a- well, character. A pretty boring one, admittedly, but it’s a gamebook so the idea was you;’d do the legwork and personalise your guy.
Unlike other gamebooks, this one ended on a cliffhanger, and told the reader to go out and buy the next book Fire on the Water. I immediately rushed to my local bookstore and found… they had been out of print for about 10 years.
Well bollocks.
I found book 5 in a booksale, and acquired the incredibly rare books 21, 27 and 28 in a way I still am not feeling comfortable of divulging given how rare the were. And for 10 incredibly frustrating years, that was about it.
Then I saved a bit of money, went to university, discovered Ebay’s second hand book section, and lost all that money very quickly.
So I managed to accumulate a full Lone Wolf gamebook collection, which is not someone everyone can say. However, the series hadn’t actually been finished due to publisher arse-hattedness, so I tried to satisfy myself by tracking down all the Lone Wolf paraphenalia I could get my hands on.
(some of it ended up in the bin. John Grant should have been shot)
And that carried on for a few more years. Everything I had was at least 10 years old, the fandom was dead, Lone Wolf had been and gone and only a few people seemed to remember it.
What happened next can only be compared to what happened to the X-men fandom in 2011.
The fandom, which had been languishing in the doldrums for years since X3, was suddenly hit with First Class with about the same effect and lightning of frankenstein.
This is what the Lone Wolf fan feels right now.
We were muddling along on project Aon, doing our shit and bothering no one, and suddenly the books were snapped up by a number of major publishers for re-release. All at once all brake are off and everyone (not least of which the author, by the sounds of it) was on a rollercoaster no one expected. Video games! App adaptations! Roleplay games! Board games! Fan published works (Joe Dever is nice like that)
Frankly someone could announce a movie next week and I wouldn’t be surprised.
And part of my is wondering… why? What makes these books so popular? They’re pretty decent pulp fantasy fare, with gloriously cheesy prose and entire sentences of word salad names that I am sad to admit I understand completely.
I guess it’s because they are legitimately fun. The world is interesting, and can get really creative when Dever finally gets off medieval fantasy and goes full on techo-magi-punk in the later books. You can read almost anything into the main character, and since it’s a gamebook that really works, so you can roleplay your own interpretation of the character.
(Mine is idealistic, stubbornly good, very much in love with Banedon and struggles with PTSD. Book 18 is my favourite because he goes through HELL)
If you like fun pulp fantasy and enjoy cheese. I really encourage people to play them. The republished books are available and there originals are available for free on Project Aon.
(apart from fixing bugs, the only republished books which significantly differs from the originals is book one)
If you do want to play them, a word of advice: they will have to pry the magic spear from your cold, dead hands. Zakhan Kimoa is a bastard and only a fool trusts a taxidermist.
You’re welcome.