Hello, welcome back to Gamebook Corner.
In 1998 the 28th book in the Lone Wolf Saga: The Hunger of Sejanoz was published. This happened right at the end of the popularity of the first ‘era’ of gamebooks as different forms of entertainment become more popular and gamebooks stopped being published.
Unfortunately for Lone Wolf fans this meant that the final four books of the epic saga would not be released. To me the Lone Wolf series of gamebooks are some of the very best. Written by Joe Dever, who has created the detailed and vivid world of Magnamund. It was a huge shame that we would not find out the conclusion to a great series of books.
At the turn of the millennium Joe gave permission to grant the rights to distribute his books for free online. This gave birth to the Project Aon website and gave the Lone Wolf books and source material a new lease of life and was able to garner new and old fans.
The popularity of Project Aon has subsequently lead to the re-publication of the Lone Wolf books as the ‘Collector Series’. The series was kicked off with a brand new re-write of book one from Joe which expanded on Lone Wolf’s ‘Flight from the Dark’. Each book was hardback bound and also included a short bonus adventure which involved the reader playing one of the other characters featured in the Lone Wolf adventures.
The collector series of books have been gradually re-published by firstly Mongoose and then more recently by Manticore-Verlag. Currently the first 22 books have been released, the popularity of these books has led to Joe Dever to begin writing the final four books of the series and to complete the epic saga of Lone Wolf.
Finally after a very long wait, book 29: The Storms of Chai was finally released to the Italian Market in November of last year. Frustratingly no English publisher was announced but around Christmas time it was announced that C7, the publisher of the Lone Wolf Role Playing Game was going to pick up the English publishing rights. Sadly they had to give up the rights shortly afterwards leaving the English publishing of book 29 in limbo.
On 1st April 2016 Joe Dever announced on his Facebook page that book 29: The Storms of Chai is going to be published in English by his own imprint – Holmgard Press. The book is available to pre-order at the following site and will be released on 11th April.
Personally I am really looking forward to reading this book as well as finding out the conclusion to the Lone Wolf saga in books 30-32.
Hopefully we won’t have to wait eighteen years for the next one!
Catch you all again soon.