Lone Wolf/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Following the less than stellar reception of the Tabletop RPG, many fans were ready to write off Mongoose Publishing as a bad rights-holder. Then it was announced that they were to reissue the series, complete with the final four volumes as Joe Dever had originally intended.
  • Badass: Lone Wolf. So very much so.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: The part in Fire on the Water with the Noodnics, a Funetik Aksented race of talking rodents who appear briefly to help you out and steal your gold, never to be referenced again.
    • Bilingual Bonus: "Noodnic" is Hebrew for "Bothersome Person". Many words in the various dark tongues in the books are also Hebrew words, although they're usually rather random ("Naar" is "Young Man"). And the "-im" suffix being used to describe a plurality of entities is also from Hebrew. Unfortunate Implications?
  • Canon Discontinuity: One of the novelizations (all largely written by John Grant with input from Dever) had an epilogue which was placed at a Distant Finale where a character drove a car and had a digital watch. Any and all suggestions of a technological future for Magnamund were not written by Joe Dever, and have been purged as heresy. (Not to say that advanced technology and Magitek don't exist, they just will never get widespread on Magnamund.)
  • Complete Monster
    • Roark, Lordling of Amory, who first appears in Book 6 and tries to kill a defenseless old man just to take his seat. Oh, did I mention that he worships Demonlord Tagazin?
    • Mad Archdruid Cadak from Books 13, 14 and 16 might count too.
    • And Kezoor the Necromancer from Book 8.
      • Note that all three are Cener Druids. Given everything else the Cenerese have done in the backstory and the series proper, all of them could be considered Complete Monsters too.
    • The Shadakine from the World of Lone Wolf series, from the rank and file to Wytch-King Shasarak himself, are all pretty big bastards too. You know it is bad when one of the most sympathetic enemies you meet turns out to be the soul-eating Eldritch Abomination that was enslaved by Shasarak.
  • Evil Is Cool: Most of the good guy nations are your standard high fantasy kingdoms, while a lot more imagination was put into the evil hordes and nasty places.
  • Heartwarming Moments
    • In Book 18, Lone Wolf notices a crowd gathered around a faith healer. The angry mob is ready to attack him for having no progress in fixing a woman's headache. When Lone Wolf realizes that the man has no powers, but genuinely wants to help people, he discretely uses his own powers to cure the woman, turning the old man into a hero for his village.
    • Another one from Book 18. After defeating the Ghost of Roark haunting the ruined and deserted town of Amory, Lone Wolf wakes up in the morning to sunshine and birdsong, and his spirits are lifted when he realizes that life is already returning to the place.
  • Ho Yay Shipping: Lone Wolf and Banedon.
  • Italians Love Lone Wolf: The series is almost universally popular among Italian tabletop gamers, where the Kai Knights have been redubbed "Ramas Knights" and a few names have been changed around to emphasize the "medieval fantasy" feel of the setting.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Many, many, many creatures of Magnamund (or the Daziarn, or the Plane of Darkness...) are absolutely nightmarish in appearance, like the Helghast. Their descriptions are short but vivid, with nice details added (like how much they inspire revulsion to Lone Wolf) and with plenty quality illustrations, mostly from the protagonist's viewpoint (that is, more often than not, when the monster is about to gut you). And you get plenty of Red Shirts or Mauve Shirts' disturbing deaths, just to demonstrate how nasty those critters are. The Helghasts and Crypt Spawns, although already quite horrific, are hardly the worst of the lot.
    • The Cener Druids in particular are dedicated to producing Nightmare Fuel. The Forest of Ruel is full of nasty things, and they're nothing compared to what's in the fortress of Mogaruith.
    • The Rahkos from Book 7, a brain-eating, undead severed hand, is largely believed to cause the most Squick-inducing death...

A searing pain explodes behind your eyes as the hand clamps itself to your head. As the decaying fingers pierce your scalp, forcing their way through your skull, your vision turns red and your body shakes uncontrollably. The hideous claw burrows deeper, feeding on the only source of nourishment that can sustain its existence: living human brain.
Your life and your quest end here.

  • That One Boss
    • Zakhan Kimah and his Orb of Death (though he's a skippable fight if you successfully throw the Dagger of Vashna at him, but you don't get the option to do so if you have the Sommerswerd).
    • Far from the only example; as mentioned in the main article, this is the tradeoff if Lone Wolf brings the Sommerswerd with him on his quests. There is at least one enemy that's nigh impossible to beat without the Sommerswerd that can't be avoided though: the Deathlord Ixiataaga.
    • The Chaos-Master in book 11 is another infamous example where the Sommerswerd makes life much, much more difficult for you.
    • The Kleasa from the World of Lone Wolf series. It is by far the most powerful enemy Grey Star ever actually fights in the series and boasts High Combat Skill, Endurance, and the ability to drain Grey Star's Endurance and Willpower even if Grey Star magically shielded himself right before the fight. It's also one of the few enemies Grey Star can't avoid fighting no matter what. And it appears in the first book. Because of this, if you roll low on your starting scores it is extremely difficult to finish the book wihout rules abuse—that you can use the magic seed to do X9001 damage. Humorously, using the seed causes an instance of Script Breaking. Project Aon suggests "fixing" this bug, leaving you a bit screwed.
  • That One Puzzle: Although Word of God has claimed otherwise, one puzzle in The Legacy of Vashna is literally unsolvable without extreme out of the box thinking or flipping to random sections in hopes it will be right. Fortunately, you don't have to know the answer to progress, but knowing the answer does evade a combat.
  • Player Preferred Pattern: Better take "Weaponskill: Sword" to get the most out of the Sommerswerd.
  • Unfortunate Implications
    • "The sight [of Lone Wolf] is so frightening that all resistance melts away, and creatures hurl themselves into the lake rather than face the fearsome straight-backed, white-skinned killer of their kin."
    • Book 7 was definitely one of the worst, probably due to it taking place in the fantasy counterpart of Africa. It doesn't help that all the slaves in the castle are dark-skinned. (Although, to be fair, the ones enslaving them were explicitly the bad guys.) Except that those slaves are not human (they are consistently described as "creatures", much like the Beastmen guards of that place). And to be even more fair, the people who were enslaving them were also black-skinned as well, like basically everyone in that part of the world.
    • Book 5 (set in a fantasy-counterpart Arab country) suffers from this too, though to a lesser extent. There are good Vassagonian characters depicted, and it's implied that at least some of the problems are caused by the puppet government put in place by the Darklords.
    • More generally: untrustworthy characters are frequently "swarthy".
  • Villain Decay: Book 15's Big Bad, Drakkar Warlord Magnaarn, almost literally goes through Villain Decay. From a cunning Badass warrior general who buries Lone Wolf alive in a trap to a shriveled and mummy-like puppet of his own Artifact of Doom on the brink of undeath.
  • The Woobie: Tavig, a character Lone Wolf may encounter in Book 7. He's just some poor guy who took on the mission of invading Castle Death to pay for his sister's ransom. After being thrown into The Maze twice, all he wants is to escape. Why is he a woobie? Let's just say that if the hero meets him, he'll only get a quick death if Lone Wolf kills him. Otherwise he'll either be torn apart by dog men or slowly crushed to death by a giant fist. Yeah, Castle Death's a fun place.
    • I was so dismayed by his death that, 15 years later after having originally read book number 7 I included a non-playing-charachter patterned after him in a D&D campaign of mine only to more or less force the players to rescue that long-lost sister of him.
    • It gets worse. The Updated Rerelease has a bonus adventure where you take control of Tavig early in his jaunt into Kazan-Oud. He kills some nasty bad guys, thwarts a plot by Zahda to escape the island, and saves a damsel in distress, and as they reach their escape, he sets her loose and goes back into the castle to his inevitable fate. Poor guy.
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