BSOLO: Ghost of Lion Castle (1984) is a pretty great solo adventure by Merle Rasmussen (Top Secret). The concept is simple: explore the castle (which is shaped like a lion), navigate its hazards and impress its builder, Sargon the Wizard, now a ghost (and probably inspired by the DC comics character Sargon the Sorcerer — they look a bit similar). Despite the straightforward premise, BSOLO is hard. Which allows for a neat feature.

The module expects you to keep notes in the margins (the “magic journal”), logging when you remove objects from a room, defeat monsters, drink potions and, especially, the location of your corpse if you die — so you can loot it in your next run through. I love this. And the fact that the idea turns up again in MMORPGs a couple decades later is also pretty great.

Special note must be made of Bob Maurus’ artwork. He only did stuff for a couple modules, but man, his stuff here is solid gold classic. The strong POV perspective in the view of the castle exterior and the illustration in the dungeon is just absolutely fantastic and unlike anything else around at the time (adventure gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy often have an implied POV, but I can’t recall any that stick “your” hands into the view). Strong anticipation of FPS videogames (which were already starting to emerge in ‘84). Dungeonsynth fans might note that the dungeon illustration has shown up in modified form fronting several Kobold albums. Finally, Maurus seems to primarily be a sculptor. I actually have a Cthulhu idol he did — never knew who the artist was until I looked him up to write this entry!