Monthly Archives: September 2015

News Roundup – 20th September 2015

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Hello everyone, just a quick news roundup from some of the articles that I have come across over the last week.

I recently found a really interesting interview with Lone Wolf creator Joe Dever on the Fascinating Nouns website.  The interview lasts for about 80 minutes and goes into quite a lot of detail as to how the world of Magnamund was created and the hugely popular Lone Wolf gamebooks.  Anyone who is interested in the series or gamebooks in general should tune in, I found it a great listen.

In the realm of the digital gamebook domain the most wonderful Tin Man Games have just recently announced their latest release which is due to be released at the end of September.  The title is called Legacy of Dorn : Herald of Oblivion and is based in Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 universe.  They also mention that they are putting the finishing touches to their version of Fighting Fantasy’s Warlock of Firetop Mountain which promises to be a bit of a departure from their previous Fighting Fantasy releases.

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Creator of the digital version of Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! gamebook series Inkle Studios have recently revealed on their Twitter feed that parts 1-3 of their applications will be coming to PC and Mac in November.  This I will definitely be purchasing as I have really enjoyed Inkle’s take on truly classic gamebooks and one of my all time favourite gamebook series.  Hopefully I can produce some play though videos when this is released.  Inkle Studios are currently hard at work creating the fourth and final part of the series The Crown of Kings.

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Finally not really gamebook related although this will be of interest to pretty much all Fantasy fans, I recently came across the Kickstarter campaign for Legend Quests which promises to be a live action dungeon crawl adventure game.  Check out their Kickstarter page which has an introduction video featuring none other than former Doctor Who actor Tom Baker.  At the time of writing they are currently up to 6% funded with 27 days left in the campaign.

 

I hope that you all are enjoying my blog so far, I would like to publish soon part two of my play though of the Lone Wolf Series : Fire on the Water.

Catch you all again soon.

Lone Wolf Book 1: Flight From the Dark – Playthrough

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One of my favourite gamebook series is Joe Dever’s quite brilliant Lone Wolf adventures.  Currently spanning 28 books (with book 29 being released later this year) it is a sprawling, epic quest covering the beautifully designed world of Magnamund.

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Book one of the Lone Wolf series entitled Flight From the Dark starts when the Kai Monastery in your homeland of Sommerlund is destroyed by a lightning attack by Sommerlund’s age old enemies, The Darklords of Helgedad.  All the Kai Lords are in attendance at the feast of Fehmarn and all are killed apart from you.  Lone Wolf’s quest is to journey through enemy held territory and arrive at the capital city of Holmgard to warn the king that the entire Kai order apart from yourself have been massacred.

The attached video is my play through of book one Flight From the Dark and it is the perfect introduction to Joe Dever’s world of Magnamund as well as the Kai Lords of Sommerlund.  This book perfectly sets the scene for Lone Wolf’s upcoming adventures.

This version of the book is played from an online version which can be viewed or downloaded from the Project Aon website.  The application I used to play this book is the brilliant Seventh Sense which has been created by fans of the books and helps the user to keep track of all Lone Wolf’s stats and equipment as you go along.

I hope that you enjoy my play-through of this book, I would like to continue through this series and make a video (or videos) of each book as I progress.

My Favourite Gamebooks

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I’ve had a chance recently to re-discover my old collection of gamebooks and it got me thinking about which ones were my favourites and what I enjoyed reading the most.

The main two groups of books that I played the most and the ones that I returned to time and again were the Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf series.  However there were others that I enjoyed playing too of which I will come to later on in this post.

First up was the Fighting Fantasy books which started this whole obsession with gamebooks for me.  To some the Fighting Fantasy were the original gamebooks, created by Games Workshop founders Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, the first book in the series ‘The Warlock of Firetop Mountain‘ was first published in 1982.

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Although I purchased most of the 59 books that were published in its first run, it was the Steve Jackson spinoff books the ‘Sorcery!‘ series that i enjoyed the most.  I liked the fact that the four books became one epic story to find and return the Crown of Kings to your home of Analand.  Also instead of playing the role of a warrior you got to play as a wizard and having to learn a whole bunch of magic spells before playing the first book added an exciting edge to the game.

The Lone Wolf series was another favourite of mine, created by Joe Dever the brilliant series of books plotted the exciting adventures of the last remaining Kai Warrior Lone Wolf.  The setting of Magnamund in the books was incredibly well realised and the adventures took Lone Wolf to many different environments battling the evil Darklords of Helgedad.

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The series ran for 28 books before the publishers pulled the plug in the late 90’s but have recently been resurrected online by the brilliant Project Aon website.  This site with the approval of Dever has been publishing online the full set of Lone Wolf books up to number 28 as well as the spin-off books that were written.  It is a fantastic resource to everything Lone Wolf related and is well worth checking out.

As well as the online editions the books have also been re-printed as special collector edition hardbacks.  The original title ‘Flight from the Dark’ was re-written by Dever and has greatly expanded the original story.  Joe Dever has also announced that he plans to complete the final four books in the series, book 29 should be due for release at the end of this year.

Although these books formed the majority of my collection there were other series that I really enjoyed playing too.  I loved the humour of J H Brennan’s Grailquest books set in Arthurian Britain and playing the futuristic time-travelling special agent in Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson’s Falcon series.  Being a child of the 80’s anything to do with ninjas was very cool and the Way of the Tiger series also by Smith and Thomson was another favourite of mine.

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I am looking forward to playing through these books once more, some of these I haven’t read in thirty years and it is going to be fun re-discovering these again.  I would hopefully like to document some of my experiences of in this blog.  It would be great to know what some of your favourite books are so please feel free to leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading!