Broken Gamebooks #8: The Lone Wolf Round-Up

Mydnight's Hero belongs to the Lone Wolf range's "New Order" subseries, where Lone Wolf had already saved the world and you now played one of his disciples in the re-established Kai Order. It also has mistakes in it, and they're two rather interesting mistakes, because - as with Steve Jackson's Sorcery! - they hint at some sort of revision to the text somewhere in the writing process. We'll cover most of the remaining issues with Lone Wolf that are worth talking about in this article, as promised way back in Broken Gamebooks #2, but we'll start with this one.

First up is section 320, where two Cavalian lordlings meet you with the statement "We meet again". Except it's possible for this to be your first meeting with them if you've skipped the previous encounter with them.

Meanwhile, in section 323, your ally Prince Karvas is unarmed. Except in section 170 he was armed, and there's no opportunity for him to get disarmed inbetween those two sections.

So: Oversights by Joe Dever, or hangovers from earlier versions? Could some earlier version of the book have made it impossible to miss the first Cavalian encounter, or included an opportunity for the Prince to lose his sword?

The whole thing is worth comparing to a situation in the next book, Rune War, where section 149 gives you the opportunity to use Assimilance, except you can only reach that section if you don't possess that particular Kai power (as it is part of a branch that is only accessible if, at an earlier paragraph, you were given the option to use Assimilance but did not have it). That actually creates several sections which are impossible to reach. This is hard to figure out. It is entirely possible Dever could have failed to realise that the opportunity to use Assimilance was redundant, depending on how he was mapping the books out as he wrote.

There are loads of similar examples of probable oversights that span multiple books; e.g. in The Curse of Naar the book asks if you've visited the Temple of Maaken in a previous adventure to see whether or not you recognise a Daemonak, even though it is possible to visit said Temple without encountering such a monster. The two examples in Mydnight feel a bit different, though, as if something is missing... and there are comparable examples of that in other Lone Wolf books, too.

Take section 239 of The Deathlord of Ixia. There is no way to access that section, and it is functionally identical to two other sections (23 and 242, if you're curious). That must surely be an example of the book being rewritten, so any path that may have linked to that section got cut out or changed, in much the same way a possible opportunity for Karvas to lose his sword was?

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So that, broadly speaking, covers the two main types of error/curiosity you're likely to find in the Lone Wolf books. (If you'd like to see every single such example, then feel free to browse the 'Footnotes' sections of the books on Project Aon.) To finish up on, then, here's a riddle from The Legacy of Vashna. A riddle which has a legacy of being impossible, because the book doesn't give you enough information to complete it. The original version is written thusly:

‘In addition to the loyal servants, there are two Dwellers of the Abyss.’

‘When the loyal servants and the Dwellers of the Abyss were counted together, their total number was doubled when my Lieutenants of Night arrived.’

‘But when my Lieutenants of Night arrived, the Dwellers of the Abyss had to leave.’

‘Exactly half of the remaining number also departed, for they were beholden to the Dwellers.’

‘From the remainder I picked the loyal servants to guard my throne of power. I chose them all, except for one who was known to me as a traitor. I executed the traitor before I set my loyal servants to guard my throne.’

‘So, mortal, answer my question: while I am here to do Naar’s bidding, how many loyal servants guard my throne of power?’

The revised edition, courtesy of Mongoose Publishing and Project Aon, changes the first bit to:

‘I possess two Dwellers of the Abyss. My loyal servants are equal in number to the months in a Magnamund year, less the number of my Dwellers of the Abyss.’

Which perhaps makes things rather too easy, but is still better than actually being totally impossible. (The answer's 10, by the way.) Amusingly enough, this seems to have spawned a similar belief to the mistake in Creature of Havoc, suggesting that because you're on a different plane of reality and talking to a God, the puzzle is meant to be impossible. But that would go against Kai wisdom, and we can't have that.

Tragically, anything interesting I have to say about these gamebooks ended a long time ago. (Some of the American printings of later books supposedly abridged them from 350 sections down to 300, but didn't bother to change some of the logic puzzles where you have to solve the puzzle to work out which section you need to turn to next, but I've not seen those.)

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Actually, there's one other thing which doesn't really break the game, but is slightly curious. In Book 2, you can come into possession of the Sommerswerd, a magical blade which massively increases your combat abilities, and is the only way to kill certain undead enemies. If you're playing the books sequentially, then having the Sommerswerd makes the next few entries in the series significantly easier. Later on, Dever starts introducing enemies that are actually more difficult if you have the Sommerswerd (including one where having the Sommerswerd and a certain amount of bad luck can actually make the fight impossible to win), which has led several readers to introduce justifications for Lone Wolf to not have the Sommerswerd in those particular books, with explanations as to why Lone Wolf might not have taken it with him and who he left it with, or even interpreting the text in such a specific way that Lone Wolf can lose the Sommerswerd but retrieve it later.

In books such as The Masters of Darkness, Dever says that the Sommerswerd is completely unusable up to a certain point and has to be kept in a special, magically shielded scabbard, because if you take it out then its goodly energy will instantly broadcast your location to all your enemies. (You're still occasionally given the opportunity to use the Sommerswerd, and readers who may have forgotten this and try to use it will find their life and their quest tragically ending right there and then, obviously.) Surely that works better than penalising dedicated players?