It is just absolutely full of awesomeness. Country by country info on the world, history, character profiles, maps, weird monsters, piles of info on the darklords. There is a bar brawl game, schematics for crafting buildings and ships for miniature play. And so much art! Lots of it in garish colors and cartoonish lines from Gary Chalk, giving everything an extremely appealing Warhammer feel. If you’re a Lone Wolf fan and don’t have this on your shelf, I highly recommend you correct that mistake!

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All the art is from the book, repurposed in Heimat der Katastrophe style. I love seeing it re-contextualized for an audio cassette. You can check it out on the HDK bandcamp, give it a listen! Hard pressed to pick a fave (“Threats Lurk Everywhere,” maybe?), but the title track is pretty representative. The groove almost moves into synthwave territory.

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Anyway, this book is a banger, and more than enough of a reason to stick with the series through the less thrilling installments. The first part is pretty standard Lone Wolf fare — the king sends you on a diplomatic mission, you go on journey — but all of it works extremely well. The second part though is just full on adrenaline — escapes, battles in the sky, reunions, it’s non-stop adventure and it thrills in a way that regular novels can’t. I mean, you could turn this into a regular novel (and I think they did, actually) but the excitement here derives from your steering of the action. This is YOUR adventure and it feels truer here than just about any other gamebook I’ve encountered.

There is a lot more to the world of Lone Wolf, some good, some meh, some amazing (I really like the four Grey Star books) but the first five are the real soul of the experience. Anyone who digs adventure gamebooks should give them a shot.

Chalk’s illustration hit a high point for me here. As much as I love his work generally and as iconic as the pictures for the first book are, I find his line work here particularly bold and striking. And we’ve got another Richard Corben cover — one of my favorites of the entire series.

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I want to talk a little more about Chalk’s art work, a specific thing he does that I think makes his stuff stand out as special. A lot of ink illustration in games gets framed by a box and like 75% of the time, the artist will have something break the frame — a claw or sword or billowing cloak. It makes the image feel less constrained and more dynamic. The thing is, those artist almost always break the frame in only one spot. Gary Chalk? He will break the frame all over the place, over and over again (and use non-square frames, to boot). This gives so many of his illustrations a kind of delirious, off-kilter energy without feeling specific or explicit — I don’t know if I ever would have put my finger on it if I wasn’t photographing the drawing for the feed.

Also, that’s Richard Corben on the cover!

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Speaking of art, this is a good time to mention that Dever initially developed Lone Wolf as an RPG…for Games Workshop! So a lot of those GW vibes you get (they come through so strong in The Magnamund Companion) probably have their root in that. And that this is an English series, and English fantasy from the 80s shares a distinct vibe.

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You can definitely see Joe Dever starting to hit his stride. This one is far more complex than the pretty simple Flight from the Dark. And it does have some undeniably great moments. The naval battle at the end is pretty fab. My favorite bit it when you try to figure out which of your traveling companions is trying to murder you. That actually might be my favorite moment in the whole series.

Gary Chalk’s art not really doing it for me in this one, alas. That’s OK though, we’ve a long road to travel.

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Like FF, Lone Wolf incorporates RPG elements. The systems are a bit simpler, I think. Combat uses random numbers to resolve — it seems like a pain but once you get the knack, it’s far faster and more frenzied than FF (and you can, I believe, get through the book with out a single fight, which is cool). More interesting is the inventory system, which allows you to manage a backpack of stuff, and the skill system, which give you special benefits or open new paths in the story. As you progress, you can gain or improve those skills, which leads us to the neatest part: the first twelve books in the series are a continuing story, so the character you have at the end of one is the one you start with in the next volume. That makes all your decisions seem so much more weighty than in most gamebooks. (even though, in practice, that is mostly sleight of hand).

Returning to this book after so long…it’s OK? A little stiff, a little unsure of itself. You’re a warrior monk. You monastery gets attacked and you’re the only survivor. You gotta go warn the king. Simple. It feels neither too easy nor too hard. At this moment in the series, though, I think the main appeal is Gary Chalk’s art, which feels so in line with the Games Workshop vibe (more on that later in the week). There’s some real classics in this book — I think my fave is the dude on the flying beast.

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