Interview of Julian Egelstaff (cont')

RG: But what about the fans themselves? Surely you have received e-mail from countless individuals from across the globe.

JE: Yes, I've got lots of e-mail from the fans themselves... I don't know how much. For a long time I kept everyone's e-mail address who had mailed me, but I stopped that after about six months or so, since the list had got to be pretty close to 100 people. That was around the same time as the mailing list formed.

I think the fans around the world all have a remarkably similar appreciation of Lone Wolf and the World of Magnamund. One of the things I wanted to do when I started the site was just see who the other fans were--what they were like. I was always the only person I knew who was into Lone Wolf, and I was really, really into it when I was younger, as I've said on the Monastery host page. So I wanted to see if there were other really hard core fans out there, or former hard core fans.

Well, pretty much from the get-go, most of the people I've got e-mail from have said very similar things. They pretty much all say, "great to see your site, I didn't know there were so many other fans, this is great, I thought I was the only one." That's pretty cool. I think it says a lot about Joe Dever's world and the attention he's put into it that it's had such a powerful and personal effect on so many people. They also have a lot of common interests in terms of what they like or want to talk about, with regard to the books themselves. Most people want to banter about the rules, such as the Weaponskill/mastery/grandmastery bonuses and whether they are all added together or not. People want to talk about the characters and the world and the geography.

These were also the things that I really liked about the world: it's history, the rules of the books, and the personal experience it was for me. I kind of modeled the Monastery around hitting on those basic things, since it was what I liked and was hoping other people wanted to talk about. So there's the detailed stuff about the books, there's stuff about the rules, and there's stuff in the library about the world. Lately, well... for most of the Monastery's history the trivia has been the major embodiment of the world side of things and the rules stuff hasn't been attended to with much care, but a lot of that has come out in the Kaiwisdom mailing list, which is probably a better place for rules discussions than a website.

People really seem to like the trivia. I think that's one thing most fans have in common: they love the depth and detail of the world, so the trivia intrigues them. The fans are mostly also folks who embody the spirit of the Kai. They are pretty much all honest, honourable folks, they are polite, but they stand up for their opinions. I think the character of the discussion on Kaiwisdom, the manner in which people carry it out, and the comradeship between the various webmasters out there now... it all points to the spirit of Kai latent in all of us. As big fans, we probably always wanted to live at the Monastery and fight the Darklords. Now, virtually, we have a chance to do that sort of, and the other fans, are our other Kai brothers. So I think that really helps build the community into the strong one it is today.

RG: Well spoken. The KaiWisdom community has had very few disagreements that haven't ironed themselves out within a few posts. Do you attribute that to the spirit of Lone Wolf? The Spirit of the Kai?

JE: Yeah, absolutely. Joe knew he was writing for essentially a young audience and Lone Wolf is a role model, like the heroes of the ancient Greek myths, like comic book heroes, like Luke Skywalker. Since we're all fans because we read the books at the right sort of age, I think we all related to and wanted to emulate, to a certain extent, the hero of the stories. He is a role model and because the books are role-playing books, that only strengthened our identifying with the hero, since we were the hero of the books in a way. I know I got so totally into it that I totally imagined myself as Lone Wolf, most of the time that I wasn't reading the books. That's for reasons I go into on my site but, regardless, I think most of us had a strong personal reaction to the stories and the character (or else we wouldn't be setting up websites about them!) and that in turn leads to us emulating those values, and so on, online.

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