The full-colour maps on the inside covers are what initially drew many to the Lone Wolf gamebooks. Joe Dever’s well-realised world of Magnamund seemed so vibrant and colourful thanks to these masterful illustrations. Each map only covered a small area, though, and the detail was missing from the large-scale maps of Northern Magnamund.

Well, thanks to long-time Project Aon volunteer Jan Charvát, the whole of Northern Magnamund has finally been mapped based on the original artwork. Using the coastal outline of Northern Magnamund from the map in The Prisoners of Time as a starting point, Jan has masterfully combined all the other maps into one huge image, showing roads, settlements and labels from the original maps.

Since Project Aon does not host fan-based work, Jan has allowed it to be hosted on the site of another Project Aon volunteer so that other Lone Wolf fans can enjoy the results of his hard work. Hopefully this will help tide fans over until the release of Voyage of the Moonstone.

Addendum: Jan has also sent a map of Southern Magnamund in the same style, and also a composite map showing both continents! These images are absolutely fantastic, and Jan deserves a huge amount of kudos for managing to compile these!

—
Simon Osborne
Project Aon

Here is Project Aon’s first offering of the year–Wolf’s Bane. In this penultimate adventure in the Lone Wolf saga you must hunt down and destroy your evil alter-ego before it lays waste to your proud reputation and your homeland of Sommerlund. So you’d best hurry and download it now!

As well as the usual download package, there is also a single-page edition without illustrations. For those who don’t mind spoilers, or who have read the book a number of times, there is also an SVG flowchart showing all the numbered sections and links between them.

Look out for Book 20: The Curse of Naar soon.

Some fans over at RPGnet are playing through the Lone Wolf gamebooks collaboratively.

During the 2008 calendar year Project Aon’s volunteers devoted many hours of their spare time to the various tasks involved in publishing the works of Joe Dever online. Much of this work was done “behind the scenes”, and so it may have seemed that little was achieved in the twelve months of 2008. This first “Annual Report” is designed to show what tasks were undertaken by Aon volunteers, and also to give a rough roadmap of what we hope to achieve over the coming 12 months.

The Report can be downloaded here.

If anyone feels they can help us in completing any of the proposed tasks for 2009, please contact us–Project Aon always needs more volunteers!

In the past few years, gamebooks have undergone something of a renaissance, and Project Aon has certainly been involved in that! It appears that our efforts have also inspired other fans of Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf series to put pen to paper and write about their interest.

Step forward Anders Österberg, a contributor to Project Aon who a few years ago was instrumental in helping us contact Cyril “Cee Jay” Julien, illustrator of the graphic novel The Skull of Agarash. This Stockholm University alumni recently wrote a paper entitled The Rise and Fall of the Gamebook and was kind enough to send Project Aon a copy. The paper is in the form of an appraisal contrasting two leading gamebook series from the 1980s/90s, one of which being Lone Wolf.

We were so impressed with it that we wanted to make this available to a larger audience. As it falls outside the remit of Project Aon–we don’t host fan-created content on the site–we requested and received Anders’ permission to host the file on the website of a Project Aon contributor with a view to blogging about it and making it available to other gamebook fans who might be interested.

The PDF can be downloaded here. Feel free to post any messages to the author via the comments button.

For Sommerlund and the Kai!