February 17, 2008

A Lone Wolf Is You! If you were a sheltered, ostracized child in the 1980s, your misspent youth undoubtedly included far too many hours Choosing Your Own Adventures. If your sheltered ostracized childhood then turned into a sheltered, ostracized adolescence, shunned even by D&D players, you may have "graduated" to the wholly nerdish realm of the Solo Adeventure! Instead of talking to members of the opposite sex, perhaps you found yourself embroiled in Fighting Fantasy, GrailQuest, or, arguably at the top of the sweaty, pimply pyramid, Lone Wolf.

Of course, those days are long over, the demons of social maladjustment that drove you to those dark tomes long since defeated. You, well adjusted survivor of teenager-hood, naturally, have no interest in the fact that Project Aon has published, online and juiced with all the power of html, a shocking number of volumes of the original Lone Wolf Saga Of course not, you're a grown up now who feels no need to retreat into the escapist fantasies of your traumatic middle school years... If you wish to spend your Sunday doing important grown-up stuff like reading the news, click here, you pussy- or, if you wish to SWEAR VENGEANCE UPON THE EVIL DARKLORDS THAT MASSACRED YOUR PROUD AND NOBLE LINEAGE, HOLD ALOFT YOUR BLOODIED SWORD AND BECOME LONE WOLF, LAST SURVIVING WARRIOR OF THE ONCE-MIGHTY KAI!!!!

  • Oh, my goodness. My old friend Grey Star the Wizard. It's been a while. He's held up better than I have.
  • Oops, I forgot to write the second "click here". DO IT ANYWAY.
  • In Soviet Russia, a you is Lone Wolf!
  • No, according to my sources, in Soviet Russia a Lone Wolf is Самотния вълк.
  • I lose? /checks action chart No, I still have 2 endurance points left.
  • A friend and I played these well into college. The One on One ones, which I know we've discussed here before. (Even though I can't find the damned link.) Good times.
  • I still have quite a collection of lone wolf books. In an odd display of my personality, I realized instantly that the upper corner was the best roll for combat. Yet, I could close my eyes, wave my pencil, then unerringly find my way to that 9.
  • Wow, Lara, I completely forgot about that post. I even commented several times. I just got a bug up my ass recently and ebayed the Sorcery! series, which then led me back to gamebooks.org and from there to this Lone Wolf site. Truth be told, I was never that much of a Lone Wolf fan, much preferring the more lighthearted Sorcery and GrailQuest books. But, seeing as it's all online and stuff, I might have to give it another whirl and see if I my Sixth Sense will see me through the day.
  • On the off-chance that anyone is actually playing this in earnest, there's a lovely, printable character sheet here.
  • why is my FF not caching images properly?
  • I don't know if this is the source of your problem, Hank, but I've noticed that the gamebooks.org site is a little wonky, sometimes timing out, sometimes not showing the images.
  • Dude! I LOVED these books. Cheers x 1,000,000!
  • Now. There was another series -- can't remember the name or any defining keywords -- where the kid detectives went on a case, and one of them drew the scene, and the image combined with the clues and you had to figure it out? Where are those?
  • Not Encyclopaedia Brown?
  • Wow - I'm back on that 40 minute country bus ride to elementary school. Mmm...fake green leather.
  • Huh, that kind of does sound like Encyclopedia Brown. Except, I don't think any of the characters were drawing the pictures...
  • Yeah, I don't think so either, but it sounds so familiar, and I used to read Encyclopedia Brown...
  • Maybe it was his cousin, Lexicon Chartreuse.
  • Okay, TUM, I think you've essentially thrown down a gauntlet here. What say we rig up a pbwiki page and produce a Monkeyfilter penned Choose Your Own Chartreuse? (Lexington Chartreuse Ruins It For Everyone is the best thing ever, by the way.)
  • TUM, I love you. And that's an awesome idea Nickdanger! Make it so. *clap clap*
  • Hey, why not? After all, with a baby due to be born any day now, a book with a deadline in three months, and a slew of mini-stories for a Korean ESL book, I've got nothing but time! Seriously, I love this idea, and I feel that it *must* happen.
  • Hey! A beebee? Yay!
  • *sets oogy-woogy-baby-talk gun to maximum stun*
  • Ahem: "I wants to pets her fwuffy widdy tumtum!"
  • Of course in that particular instance it couldn't be helped.
  • Oh dear. The poor child must be warned about your people.
  • I should have made myself clearer - it's not a gun to defend against oogy-woogy; it's a gun to assault people with oogy-woogy.
  • D'oh!
  • Will it give them an owie?
  • Let that boy oogy-woogy. It's in him, and it's gotta come out.
  • I would like to see some of this Chartreuse person. Also, more bodice ripper!
  • Huh. So it turns out that there are sites devoted to creating Choose Your Own Adventure stories. For instance, this one. Seems like a reasonable way to start. Is anybody actually interested in doing this?
  • Wait, wait, go back to the baby bit...
  • Search MoFi: there's been one posted in the last month, by Plegmund, I think?
  • I been pwned.