Lone Wolf Adventures

In 1994, my parents arranged to transfer my sister and I from the nearby elementary school (less than half a mile from our house) to another one in the area (about two miles from our house). And so I started third grade in the classroom of Mrs. Hornreich. Due to administrative rearrangements with crowded classrooms and relocation of some classes to new "portable" accessory buildings, I was soon moved out of the main building into the trailer classroom of Mrs. Meskill. And it was in Mrs. Meskill's class that I was introduced to the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. These were quite popular among my classmates at the time. I don't recall exactly which ones I read on my own, but there were several. We also did group playthroughs in class.

In 1997, the arrival of new housing developments had pushed that elementary school to capacity and my parents were informed that the school could no longer accommodate the transfer. So my parents looked farther afield, to a school that was about seven and a half miles away. My mother would end up working there serving lunch for twenty years, but that wouldn't be until later. So my final year of elementary school was spent in the classroom of Mrs. Johnston. The school library at "Grass Lake" was somewhat modest, but it did introduce me to Redwall among other things. But Mrs. Johnston also maintained a few bookshelves in her own classroom, a little classroom library. And I have to say that her taste was better than the school library overall. This was how I discovered The Chronicles of Prydain. It was also how I discovered the Lone Wolf gamebooks.

The book Mrs. Johnston had was Castle Death, the seventh book in the series. Once I opened it up and figured out what it was, my immediate comparison was to the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series. But this book was different. You tracked information with pen and paper. You had equipment. And your choices from one book could carry over to another. I loved the idea.

I played through Castle Death a few times. The school library didn't have any books from the series and I didn't see them on the shelves at the Covington library. I placed a hold on The Caverns of Kalte. It was the first time I saw a KCLS book with a "CS" sticker as its home library location (Central Storage). I was a bit confused at having my Magnakai powers taken away, but I quickly got up to speed. I died to the Helghast and became obsessed with getting my hands on the Sommerswerd. Eventually, I found Flight from the Dark somewhere. And then I also found The Jungle of Horrors. But I figured out that I needed Fire on the Water in order to get the Sommerswerd, and I couldn't find a copy of that book anywhere.

I kept the idea of getting back to this series in mind, but left it alone just because it was too difficult to find copies of the books. Eventually, I discovered Project Aon, which allowed me to play through the entirety of the Kai, Magnakai, and Grand Master series all for free. So I did. And at long last, I obtained the wonderful Sommerswerd. I imagine that I still have the paper note sheet somewhere, buried with other old documents.

Last year I noticed that paperback "Definitive Editions" from Holmgard Press were available for both the Kai and Magnakai series on Amazon. So those immediately went on my wishlist. My brother got me the books for Christmas. Actually, I think two people independently got me the books as a Christmas gift and I returned one set. I left the other one in its plastic seal for several months. I didn't know whether to dig into them and play through these new editions myself or try to run some kind of game for someone else. I'd thought of running a campaign taking others through the books on the Casual Players Alliance or through some Discord. Wasn't sure if there'd be any interest in that. And I was focused on my Heinlein juveniles project anyway, so the Long Wolf books sat there.

About six weeks ago, I decided that it might be a fun project to run ChatGPT through the books. I had to do a lot of typing in order to transcribe the longer passages, but that was good practice for me anyway. There have been some problems with this approach, but I actually have had fun with it. ChatGPT's only death so far was in the Tarnalin sections of Fire on the Water, which I consider to be probably the deadliest part of the whole series. Now we're well into The Kingdoms of Terror.

After Robot-Brain obtained the Ornate Silver Key in The Caverns of Kalte, but then passed by the room with the locked chest containing the Silver Helmet, I thought, "Hey, I would have done a better job there. Let's start a parallel playthrough. So now I've got two separate instances of Lone Wolf, both in The Kingdom of Terrors.

I'm not trying to pitch these gamebooks (although I do recommend them). I just wanted to post about an interest of mine that has been seeing a bit of a resurgence lately.